Intermezzo
Boom in Malaga
Frederick “Boom” Jackson would lead a carefree life for the most part—remarkably so for a mid-century gay man from the provinces, and decidedly in contrast to the swooping ups and downs experienced by his more gifted, troubled brother. Both lives, each in its own way, were very interesting. As Charlie wrote in Farther and Wilder (as well as various other unpublished reminiscences), his little brother had been wildly popular throughout Europe—the sort of gilded youth who attracts comely people of all classes:
He had not been the least bit impressed by his social success in Paris, London, St. Moritz, Davos, Berlin, the Riviera, Rome, Capri; he simply took it all for granted in the most disarming, artless way that only added to the charm he had been so unself-conscious of. Perhaps he was not genuinely loved, but he himself seemed to love everybody; he had, in short, a flair for life, all too rare in those blasé times in Europe between the Wars.
While in Davos, Boom had fallen in love with a fellow TB patient named Hamlet (no less), who had planned to pursue a Ph.D. in English at the University of Michigan, but soon died.1 Boom appears to have picked up the pieces with relative dispatch. At the height of his youthful beauty he was photographed in Paris by Man Ray and George Platt Lynes—the latter famous for his nude portraits of gorgeous young men, many of whom Lynes slept with. Along with his lovers Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescott—a ménage that endured for years on two continents—Lynes was at the center of gay expatriate life in Europe, and for a while Boom was evidently part of their circle. Years later, during a 1947 holiday at Somerset Maugham’s villa in Cap Ferrat, Monroe Wheeler wrote nostalgically to Boom: “It is enchanting to be back here on the scene of my misspent youth and find nothing changed; many people I knew then are still here, and the youngsters are more beautiful than ever.… I think of you often very tenderly … and send my love.”
Like his brother, Boom never returned to Europe after his final season in Davos (1933), though for the rest of his life he affected certain cosmopolitan mannerisms—always using his fork with his left hand, and abbreviating his middle name (Storrier) as “St” (a quirk that complicated his life a bit, as he was initially listed as “St. Jackson” in the phone book). Such refinement stood him in good stead as co-proprietor of Scotland Run Antiques in his adopted town of Malaga, New Jersey; the shop occupied the front of a charming old house (bought for him by Mr. Winthrop), and was named after a stream that ran behind the home of his lover, Dr. Jim Gates, two blocks away on Defiance Road. For three years or so, Boom’s business partner was another Winthrop protégé named Reggie Bacon, a former Shakespearean actor who was best remembered for playing Rosencrantz opposite his twin brother’s Guildenstern. His association with Boom, however, was troubled. Bacon, two years older, fancied himself an expert in antiques, treating Boom as a novice and acting highfalutin in general (he could recite even more Shakespeare than Charlie, and did, to the latter’s chagrin)—this despite humble origins on a farm in Gorham, Maine, to which he happily (for Boom) returned after his cottage in Malaga burned down in 1940. Alas, by then he’d gained the upper hand in Mr. Winthrop’s affections (“You can be sure Reggie loses no time inviting [Winthrop to Maine] on every possible occasion,” Charlie grimly noted), and when the latter died he left $75,000 to Bacon and a measly $3,000 to Boom.
But again, Boom had a flair, and by then Scotland Run was a going concern. The quaint house on Harding Highway, with its two antique carousel horses out front (stylized versions of which appeared on Boom’s stationery and place mats), became a popular destination in the area, and soon Boom was supplying many of the better dealers in New York. Arguably, though, he was even more acclaimed for his stunningly intricate hand-braided rugs, custom-designed for well-heeled clients at a considerable fee. A nearby manufacturer of wool coats supplied Boom with scraps of fabric in every color, which he hung in his backyard barn and sold to his rug-making students—matronly women, mostly, who (according to a friend) were “just crazy about Boomer” and would have paid for the charm of his company alone.
Charlie’s attitude was contemptuous. As far as he was concerned, Boom was a peddler of kitschy bric-a-brac (“you may expect [as a gift] some cracked object from the shop,” he wrote his daughter Sarah, “which is unkind of me but you know Boom’s shop”), and toward the end of his life he almost caused a permanent rift when he made a sneering reference to “Boom’s rag rugs.” By then, however—especially when things were going well in his own affairs—Charlie liked to say that he and Boom had little in common anymore. As he pointed out in Farther and Wilder, on the rare occasion that Don Birnam still thought of his little brother, Warwick, he couldn’t help picturing him “sitting in a corner of his living room, listening to a soap opera and sewing with elaborate gestures the carefully chosen, tightly-braided strands of a rug together”:
And when Don recalled his brother’s gay days of study at the Art Students’ League and the often promising paintings of his early years, he was puzzled and saddened. Somewhere along the line Warwick had given up (Don never knew why); he must secretly have decided that he did not have real talent after all; he refused to compete with others, as if he was loath to be doomed to mediocrity in an art he loved; and at a comparatively early age—thirty at the most—he had retired to a small Delaware village that could hardly be called a village at all, to run an antique business, on the assumption, perhaps, that it was more sensible to be a big fish in a little pond. Life could do awful things to one; and it was sad to think that, after such a promising start, he had wound up nothing more than a small-town queen. But, in spite of a certain bitterness, he was happy. And who could say which of the two had instinctively chosen the righter way? As for Don, he was anything but happy; and he knew it.
Who indeed could say? One might venture to suggest that Boom’s greatest talent had always been for friendship, and by accepting (quite cheerfully, it seems) his limitations as an artist he had freed himself to enjoy life. Boom had friends all over the world that he happily kept in touch with, and around Malaga he was a beloved figure. “He knew half of South Jersey,” said a neighbor, noting that it was hardly a secret Boom was gay. One reason he’d come to Malaga in the first place was that Don Hastings and Dan Crane, a couple he’d met among the theatre crowd in Brattleboro, had settled a block away on Harding Highway. And then of course there was his lifelong partner, Dr. Gates, who kept an office in nearby Bridgeton and came to Malaga on Wednesdays and weekends, when Boom was apt to have neighbors over for martinis and speak of his “gentleman caller.”
All his neighbors became dear friends. Across the street were the Peeches: Harry, an insurance underwriter; Grace, his Scottish wife; and their children, Freddy and Barbara. Grace’s broadmindedness was apparent from the beginning, in 1936, when Boom and Charlie had approached Barbara at Malaga Lake and asked her to have lunch with them; the vivacious twelve-year-old went home to ask her mother’s permission, and Grace sized up the two strange men in their touring car and readily agreed—insisting, however, that the girl change out of her bathing suit into a little pink dress with bows on each shoulder, whereupon the brothers realized she was still a child. (At the restaurant, the waitress assumed that bald Charlie was her father.) From that day on, Charlie and Boom were good friends with all the Peeches,2 and Barbara became especially close to Boom; she took a job at the DuPont plant after high school and spent the rest of her life in the Malaga area. Her one-time babysitter, Bea Smith (who lived three houses away on the lake), also worked at DuPont, and also became one of Boom’s most devoted friends, often doing secretarial work for Charlie.
“Boom was Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle,” said a friend. “His house was this cozy place with lots of nice things to look at, and he loved to cook for you.” Before dinner, Boom would serve his guests martinis with an appetizer of scallions and salt; almost every night of his adult life, he allowed himself two cocktails, rarely more or less; unlike his brother, he didn’t feel any particular need to drink heavily. (After seeing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, he wrote his niece Sarah: “But how terrible, the language was nothing compared to the viciousness and meanness in it.… How can people be so cruel? I think liquor helps, and therefore should be taken moderately.”) Any of the hundreds of friends he wrote letters to, and remembered with presents, were welcome to stay at his house whether he was home or not; he told them where to find the key, and they let themselves in at whatever hour and went to sleep in the downstairs bedroom.
Every single day Boom wrote a postcard (at least) to his dearest friend in the world, Franny Ferrer, who lived across the country in Pacific Palisades. Boom had met Franny and her husband Mel when the couple were young actors in Brattleboro, and for the rest of his life he’d spend a few weeks out of every year visiting her family (with detours north to see his old pal Bick)—until, in 1953, Franny divorced Mel for the second time and asked Boom to marry her. He was wonderful with her children, and besides they loved each other and had such a good time. Boom, after some reflection, declined: “It would have been a damn bad idea,” said Franny’s daughter Pepa, whose first bath was given to her by Boom. “A lot of fun, but I don’t think so.” And meanwhile he stayed in touch with Mel, too, and became friends with his new wife, Audrey Hepburn.3 Perhaps this had something to do with Boom’s disapproval, in 1956, when Franny married the artist Howard Warshaw; he let his displeasure be known by sending the couple a set of towels monogrammed “F” as a wedding gift. When Warshaw proved a decent husband after all, he and Boom became friends, and Boom continued as a kind of surrogate father to Franny’s children, writing Pepa every day in college and attending her two weddings.
The problem was solved, it seemed, when Sal came to live with Boom in Malaga. Each day had a placid sameness: in the morning she’d make her way slowly, painfully, down the stairs, with Boom’s help, then sit in her chair reading a magazine or listening to the radio (later watching TV) while Boom brought her meals and whatever else she needed until bedtime. “I often think that Sal couldn’t be pried loose from her sedentary moorings by the H-bomb,” Charlie wrote his sister-in-law in 1954, cheered by the fact that his mother was now safely ensconced elsewhere; “and why not, if she is comfortable that way?” Usually, to be sure, she seemed quite comfortable. Not only did she have a tender companion in her dotage—as well as many charming guests who professed to find her delightful—but Boom often made a point of buying her lovely new outfits at the Lane Bryant (for large women) in Philadelphia, and other little gifts that might please her. The only downside for Sal, really, were those long trips her son insisted on taking to California each year, during which she’d pepper him with scolding letters (“I don’t know when I have felt so all alone”—though Jim Gates and others were looking after her. “You told me you couldn’t afford to go to Orford … Well—how could you afford to go to California” etc.)—this, even when Boom informed her that he was suffering from one of his lung ailments: “I AM REALLY SICK,” he wrote in big red letters across a page of her kvetching, “AND YOU WRITE A COMPLAINING LETTER LIKE THIS TO ME.” But of course he didn’t mail it.
Nor did he mail a letter to Charlie, in 1956, that began, “It’s high time you contributed to Mother’s financial support.…” By the early 1950s Charlie could hardly pay the grocer, much less provide an allowance to his mother. Recently, though, he’d boasted to Boom about his “fabulous” salary at Kraft Television Theatre (“my cup runneth over”), and yet he’d failed to send so much as a Christmas gift to Sal. For that matter, neither had their brother Herb, though Bob sent ten dollars a month and wrote an occasional note. “Jim [Gates] does more for her than you or Herb,” Boom indignantly wrote Charlie. “You don’t care to remember when I helped you out. I could paper a wall with the checks I’ve given you—and what have you ever done for me? Nothing—even when you’ve been able to.” But perhaps he remembered that Charlie had, in fact, been generous in various ways (inviting Boom to live at Six Chimney Farm, for instance)—and then, things were just complicated in Charlie’s case; anyway he declined to mail such an irate letter.4 No such compunction applied, however, where Herb was concerned, and for his pains Boom received a scalding rebuttal from Bob, who hadn’t forgotten what it was like squeaking by on her husband’s piddling salary at the paper mill while Charlie and Boom gadded about Europe—and besides: why should a lonely, aging homosexual complain about the “privilege” of taking care of his mother? “My Gosh, Fred,” Bob wrote, “she is the only family you have [in Malaga] and I should think you would be so darned glad you had someone to think of besides yourself you would be down on your knees thanking the good Lord.” At any rate Boom continued to be a dutiful son, mostly at his own expense.
And he was nothing but grieved over his mother’s decline at the beginning of 1962. “It’s all she can do to get downstairs for her noon soap opera and then she dozes off many times during the day,” he wrote his niece Sarah. “She may pull out of it as she has before. I hope so.” Within a few weeks, though, she died, under circumstances that must have rankled. Charlie had been visiting while their mother lay on her deathbed, and at one point Boom stepped out to the post office for that day’s voluminous mail: the big event of his day, after all. When he returned, the mother he’d so lovingly tended these many years was dead. As Charlie would always tell it, “Well, Boom was off somewhere, but I was here and she died in my arms …”5
More and more, though, Boom was content to be a homebody in Malaga, and why not? He had everything he wanted there, including a man who loved him to the exclusion of all others: “I don’t seem to enjoy anyone but you and everyone else tires me so,” Jim wrote him during one of his vacations, teasing him on another occasion (when he was in Sausalito with louche Bick) to “have a swell time … and let your conscience be your guide.” The two shared everything—houses, cars, pets (“Annie,” Jim would say to one of his many dachshunds, “show Barbara what girls do in the park,” whereupon the dog would roll over on her back)—and during the last decade of Boom’s life, they bought a place together in Strathmere, New Jersey, south of Ocean City, since Boom had always loved the beach and enjoyed showing off his legs to the end. “Jim is still out of control periodically,” Rhoda wrote in March 1972, nine months after Boom’s death, when Jim continued to weep at any reminder of his beloved.
