CHAPTER 4
CECIL FANNING’S TEA CAKE
1920–1921
AS HE ENTERED REED COLLEGE as a boarding freshman in September 1920, one of eighty-five first-year students, James had new confidence in himself. His favorite look included a thick navy-blue cardigan. It stretched to engulf his stomach, something a blazer couldn’t do, with brass buttons and pockets capacious enough for his hands. He wore straight neckties under floppy collars. He combed his fine hair—sandy after a summer’s bleaching at the coast—with a dramatic side part and a high sweep across his forehead. He was six feet three, two hundred forty pounds. He could look in the mirror, see his cherub’s face with its wicked smile and fading sunburn and almost believe he was handsome. At seventeen, and for the first time in his life, James felt a sense of ease someplace other than the beach.
Other men in the class of 1924 stood nearly as tall as James. None exuded his presence or carried themselves (walked or laughed or buttered their toast) with quite as much character. To the women who became his instant friends, he was a gossipy girlfriend and a wisecracking brother rolled into one. To men—fellows with muscles, tanned faces, and thick, brilliantined hair, who played football and canoed on Crystal Springs Lake—James was a hulking, high-voiced clown, the fatty who made everyone laugh, and flaunted the things that made him different.
He and Reed seemed perfect for each other.
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SIMEON GANNETT REED WAS a well-off young man from Massachusetts who trekked to the Pacific during the California Gold Rush. In Oregon, he made his own fortune in transportation—first in river shipping, later in railroads. When he died in 1895, he left his widow Amanda with millions, along with a behest that she find some way to spend them on the improvement and edification of the citizens of Portland. By the time she died, in 1904, she hadn’t fulfilled his wishes, though four years later trustees of the institute established in the Reeds’ name announced they would use Simeon’s bequest to build a liberal arts college. And after the son of Simeon’s former business partner donated forty acres of farmland in the Eastmoreland district of southeast Portland, not far from the Willamette, Reed College was fit to rise in fields that not long before had known the plow.
To serve as president of this new institution—a beacon of enlightenment for the people of Portland—the trustees recruited a serious young academic, William Trufant Foster, thirty-one, from Bowdoin College in Maine. Under Foster, Reed would be anti-elitist, free of class, anti-Semitism, sex discrimination, and what the new college board called “highbrowism.” It would be unlike the corrupt and aristocratic institutions on the East Coast—Harvard, Princeton, Yale—that bred and coddled what reformers branded an arrogant ruling class. Instead, Reed’s curriculum would incubate a new society, full of the vigor and openness of the West, based on the lessons of literature, science, and art.
Everything about Reed would be different. There would be no intercollegiate sports, only intramural ones; no fraternities or sororities, nothing to distract from learning. All courses would be electives; teachers would assign grades secretly, sharing them only later, after students graduated (assuming they did). In their third year, students would have to argue why they should be granted a fourth. And there would be no formal honor system, nothing legalistic and therefore easily broached in spirit (as at Ivy League schools), but something deeper: a principle of honor and personal purity that would apply to every part of college life.
Reed’s first semester opened in the fall of 1911 with forty-six students. Half were women. Foster would tell the New York Times that, on its first day, Reed was the only American college “that had made no mistakes, [and] that had no alumni of which it might be ashamed.”
For all its iconoclasm, Reed clung to the comforting optics of an old and hallowed English university. Its insignia was a griffin, a creature that appeared to be liberated from shield-bearing duty on a baronial coat of arms. There was morning chapel, nonsectarian and voluntary, but Reed encouraged students to attend, since it offered “regular provision for religious thought and aspiration.” The heart of the campus was the Old Dorm Block of brick and stone tracery, built in 1912 (“old” was pretty much just a mood). Its Tudor arches, bays, and heraldic reliefs could have been pried off an outbuilding of Hampton Court Palace in London. Rising above a green commons ringed with towering Western red cedars like sentinels, it fronted a forested canyon.
On wet evenings, the campus felt like a setting for some brooding neo-Gothic romance. “Glance at the old rickety bridge”—the one that spanned Reed Lake, behind the Old Dorm Block—read the Griffin yearbook of 1921 (James’s first). “Time has clothed it with romance. To appreciate the spot you must have night with the great branches shimmering in the water while the moon rides along in the depths of the lake.” It was a place where a boy, released from the rules of home and the gaze of family, could imagine falling in love.
At the start of James’s freshman year, Reed’s student newspaper had a message for the entering class of 1924. It described the special bond—the spirit—that developed with a teacher for any student willing to yield completely. “You are entering Reed in a year destined to distinction,” ran the item in the Quest. “Many of you will catch the spirit this first year, for the faculty is ‘at least as strong’ as at any time in Reed’s history.” In its tenth year, Reed had a large slate of novice teachers, and two new departments.
“And when you have a real teacher,” James read in the Quest that September, “a man whose good fellowship and physical vigor are sufficient to make his scholarship attractive and stimulating, you cannot help yourself. You become enthusiasts for learning without a struggle.”
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A FEW WEEKS INTO the fall semester, Reed held student elections. James was voted freshman class treasurer (he had just one opponent: Alvin Hawks), responsible for fundraising and party planning. Also on the ballot: whether first-year Reedies should take up the sophomores’ challenge in the annual interclass tug-of-war. The freshmen voted to accept, and in early October, on a cloudy day with a raw wind blowing, teams assembled on each edge of a shallow finger of Crystal Springs Lake, fifteen men per side. James took up the anchor position, farthest from the fulcrum point, which hovered, taut, above the water.
The whole school had trudged to the lake to watch, said a reporter for the Quest: students, faculty, maids, kitchen workers, even the gardener. The whistle blew, “the rope pulled taut, women cheered, coaches yelled and the sophomores pulled the freshmen thru [sic] the lake. . . . James Beard, 240-pound end man for the freshmen, ended the contest by splashing into the pond. Sputtering, gasping for breath, choking on duckweed. . . .” The sophomores had won, though James, on the losing team, was the star. The reporter even had a nickname for him: “Sliver” Beard, a burn on his size (“sliver” being slang for toothpick).
Portland’s afternoon paper, the Oregon Daily Journal, also sent a reporter, who fudged some of the details to heighten the comedy of a fat kid flailing in the water (upping James’s weight by ten pounds; saying he was first, not last, to hit the lake). Any night, Reed students could take the streetcar up to the Palm Theatre on Hawthorne and, for a nickel, watch a mugger hilariously fleece Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle in Life of the Party. Arbuckle shivered in the cold on screen, his coat stripped to reveal his helpless, doughy body straining the seams of a Buster Brown suit. In James, Reedies had their own life of the party.
He quickly became a running bit in the Quest. A story about a campus straw poll before the 1920 US presidential election, in which Reedies voted overwhelmingly for prosperity candidate Warren G. Harding, made up a quote as a gag. “Reed Straw Vote Successful,” a headline blasted. “ ‘No More Lean Years,’ Says Beard.” Another item had a history professor asking, “What made the tower of Pisa lean?” and James replying, “I don’t know—if I did I might try it.”
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REED COLLEGE WAS in trouble, though.
Besides tuition, the school’s survival depended on community support: convincing enough ordinary Portlanders to donate to an institution that enriched the life of their city. But how to keep popular support, in a conservative region, for such a singular and progressive college? From the beginning, William Trufant Foster knew he would have to convince the city at large that it needed the college, not just as a place to learn but also as a guardian of ethics and culture; that Reed couldn’t keep to its Tudor fastness among the trees of Eastmoreland and play out private rituals. So in theaters downtown, the college’s drama club put on plays, the chorus gave recitals, and teachers delivered public lectures. Foster worked to plant an idea of Reed as essential to the intellectual and moral life of Portland.
Foster even came up with a mystical name for the fellowship of students, teachers, and civic allies he envisioned taking up this mission of learning and morality stretching beyond campus lines. Together, they were Comrades of the Quest.
Except most Portlanders didn’t particularly care for the college, much less tbecoming Foster’s comrades. Reed plays and recitals were always fun, but the school didn’t even have a football team to root for. Foster’s talk of quests sounded like academic claptrap, the thoughts of a man out of touch with ordinary working people. Portlanders’ financial support—vigorous at the beginning—withered. Only five years after Reed rose in the fields of Eastmoreland, the institution was at risk of sinking.
By 1919, the year before James entered Reed, most of the original faculty had scattered. When Foster offered his resignation, the board of trustees didn’t object. As 1920 dawned, Reed lacked a president and had just eight faculty members and a librarian. Still, sacrificing President Foster seemed to work. “The regents are persuading the city that Reed is truly its college,” the Quest reported. “And the college in turn is striving to serve the community in every way possible.” Would Portlanders be willing to give Reed a second chance?
“Reed college opens its tenth year . . . under unusually auspicious circumstances,” the Oregon Daily Journal reported, a day before James became a freshman. “The appropriation of $75,000 from the general educational fund has been matched by Portland subscriptions, and the college budget for 1920, including faculty salaries, pay for student labor, building expense, and appropriations for research has reached the highest point.”
That summer, the acting administration made fifteen faculty hires. Among them was the head of the new German department, who would also be codirector of the drama club (Reed lacked a dedicated theater department). He was a tall, dark-haired, twenty-eight-year-old bachelor who’d grown up in Wichita, Kansas. His name was Edmund Carl Bechtold. James thought it might have been fate that assigned Professor Bechtold to live in the same dorm where he, James, was to stay: House I, Reed’s newest.
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OTHER STUDENT RESIDENCES clustered in the Old Dorm Block. Each was segregated by gender. House I, a clapboard farmhouse with a crisp white porch, on a grassy slope, was just off campus, across Woodstock Road from Reed proper. It housed ten men, all in modest-size single bedrooms. (Herman Kenin, likewise in the class of ’24, had the room next to James’s.) The boys took their meals in the commons, on campus, since House I had only a small kitchen, just adequate for making toast or tea. There was a phone in the hall, which always seemed to be in use (James called Elizabeth on Sundays).
There was already a resident parrot, Feathers, donated by Ted Eliot, the house prexy (president). Feathers could only screech “Ar-r-r-rk,” though every man in the house tried teaching him a vocabulary. House I’s formal mascot was a black cat, which ruled over its “mystic lair,” according to The Griffin yearbook, and “many a midnight revel.” Prohibition had begun in January. An abiding aim of the men of House I was to sneak in liquor under Professor Bechtold’s nose.
Edmund Bechtold was born in a Kansas farm town, the son of a German-speaking minister. As a student at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, he acted in performances of the German dramatic club. Then came Columbia University and a brief flirtation with Broadway; then the Great War, during which he served as second lieutenant in the air services. Back in Kansas, Bechtold taught high school, even rose to become principal, but he was restless. By 1920, he was off again, this time to Pocatello, Idaho, and a job as a newspaperman. A mere two months later, however, the Oregon Daily Journal was introducing Bechtold as founding director of the new German department at Reed College. “He has the reputation of being one of the most capable school men of Kansas,” the Daily Journal reported—which was curious, since he’d only ever taught in a single rural high school. Clearly, he knew how to make a good first impression.
Portland was lucky to have landed such a bright new academic star, one who also promised to electrify the city’s cherished amateur dramatics. His talents spanned the campus and the city; the local papers were already intrigued. Reed needed good press and Bechtold seemed the perfect man to get it. And this was the part that seemed to James like fate, since getting Professor Bechtold to notice him was the key to landing a meaty role in a big play downtown. Since they lived under the same roof, James had a leg up.
It wasn’t long before the men of House I came up with a nickname behind his back: “Becky” Bechtold, half affectionate, half mocking—also a joke, given his impressive height and piercing intensity. A girl’s name was just so wrong it was funny.
Bechtold had a strong face, brutal at certain angles, commanding rather than handsome. His head looked large for his lean body, as though his brain was so big it needed extra skull. He combed his dark hair back from a widow’s peak trespassing onto his high, smooth forehead, above a frank and forceful nose. He wore wire-rimmed glasses with clinically round lenses and stiff Oxford collars with points partly concealing the plush, dimpled ties he favored. In conversation, he had a pet expression: old chap. “Chapel in ten minutes, old chap,” he’d say to Floyd Woodings, usually the last man to straggle down the stairs in the morning. “You don’t want to be late.” Or “Thanks, old chap,” when Harry McCoy handed him his umbrella as he prepared to dash out in the rain to cross Woodstock Road.
When some of the men asked about this, Bechtold said it was likely a phrase he picked up at Columbia, where he pursued postgraduate studies and sought the company of theater men. (He’d tried out for Charles Frohman’s famous New York theatrical company, and even made it to the stage in a small role.)
James found it thrilling, the stories of New York and Broadway and “old chap.” Bechtold was worldly in a way that surpassed his mother’s friends, even Stella. He’d seen and done things far from the dripping trees, muddy fields, and small minds of Oregon, even farther than San Francisco. James was getting desperate to leave Portland, to get out into the world. To follow in “Becky” Bechtold’s footsteps to New York, and beyond.
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JAMES WAS GETTING SOME good press of his own. The great Neapolitan baritone Antonio Scotti of New York’s Metropolitan Opera assembled a company for a tour of the Western states. Scotti’s ensemble was to sing three complete operas in Portland, in the Romanesque splendor of the Heilig Theatre. To Reed went an audition call for supernumeraries (aka supers), actors who could, without speaking parts, mill around the stage during crowd scenes.
James was one of thirty-two men chosen—he nabbed the role of the bishop in Puccini’s Tosca. (In 1901, Scotti had premiered the role of Scarpia in the opera’s Met debut.) For James, it was a thrill: to smear on the stage makeup and shimmy into a sour-smelling black robe and fake-ermine cape; to hear the performers clear their throats and warm their vocal chords off stage; to wait in the wings for his cue to walk on and silently bless the chorus of Italian peasants.
James and the other Reed supers were each paid a buck. On the streetcar back to campus, he and the other budding singers terrorized passengers with displays of coloratura. “It is said,” the Quest joked, “that one Woodstock conductor has requested a quiet transfer to a quiet owl line.” The article called James “super of supers”—a weak crack about his weight—but it didn’t matter. It was enough for James to have made an impression.
Other possibilities then opened. For the first time in his life, he was not in Elizabeth’s house, either in town or at the beach. At the freshman Halloween dance—the Bumpkin Ball—James showed up at the autumn-leaf-and-cornstalk–decorated gym in drag: one of Elizabeth’s old hats, a pair of tablecloths borrowed from the commons, draped like a slouchy Russian peasant tunic and skirt and tied at the waist with a cord and paper roses. James was among the party’s “naughty children,” the Quest noted, yet he acted the perfect lady and won second place in the costume contest. (First prize went to Ann Shepard, who’d fashioned a gown from burlap sacks.) Away from home, James was feeling freer and more open than ever before. His friends encouraged him to be outrageous. He began to think of himself as a rebel.
As 1921 arrived, so did the baritone Cecil Fanning. He’d come to Portland with his piano accompanist, Mr. H. B. Turpin, to perform an evening of favorites from Handel’s Messiah. Fanning was known for making melodramatic arm gestures during recitals. Critics said his singing could be toneless; to James, he was a transcendent star. One afternoon, he showed up at Fanning and Turpin’s hotel room (the bridal suite at the Mallory) and introduced himself as a hopeful young tenor eager for training. Fanning and Turpin were “special friends,” as Elizabeth called them, men of the theater, like the ones she’d known at Theodore Kruse’s Louvre. James flirted with Fanning, who asked him to stay and chat over tea. Fanning, pale and sensitive looking, with deep-black beagle’s eyes, flirted back, though Turpin looked as though he wanted to throw the boy out. Fanning asked James to sing.
James struggled through “E lucevan le stelle” from Tosca (he’d studied it since hearing Scotti the night he supered). James’s voice was loud and uncontrolled, though, and at times he fought to find the melody. Turpin winced and rolled his eyes. Fanning was unfazed.
Fanning told James he was a born Heldentenor: big, high, and dramatic. And perhaps James should consider finding a teacher in New York. Herbert Witherspoon, maybe?
Yes, James answered, as he reached for more tea cake. New York was always where he imagined his future.
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IN MARCH, the papers were buzzing. Professor Bechtold had unveiled plans for an artistic spectacle the likes of which Portland had never seen. It would happen in three months, during Reed’s commencement week.
DANCE DRAMA IS BECHTOLD PLAN, shouted the headline in the Quest. They called it “Reed’s most stupendous dramatic [and] aesthetic dancing attempt, and the first of its kind to be staged in the northwest.” The Sunday Oregonian had details: “Edmund C. Bechtold of the department of Germanic languages has written the drama, entitled ‘The Swan Knight,’ gathering his material from old French, English and German legends of Lohengrin. The entire presentation will be in pantomime in three cycles, with interpretive dancing by the principals and a chorus of 30.”
The Swan Knight promised to be Wagnerian not only in theme (the Quest called it “a gripping tale of tenth century knighthood”) but also in scale. And since no indoor theater would be able to do it justice, Bechtold was planning to mount it outside, on the heavily wooded peninsula jutting into the northern end of Crystal Springs Lake and in the lake itself. The experience of twilight amid trees and shadow was sure to evoke an almost mystic feeling in the audience. “After surveying the location,” the Quest reported, “Mr. Bechtold declared that nature must have created it for the dance spectacle.” More than fifty students would be needed for the cast of dancers, singers, and musicians. Miss Anna Nilson, instructor of physical education, would lead the dance rehearsals.
Word spread fast. The Quest noted that it caused “considerable stir among dramatists, dancers and musicians of Portland. Offers of aid are pouring in, and some of the foremost dancing instructors of the city have even offered to take the leads.” But Bechtold and Nilson were not to be persuaded: Students alone would play all parts. In the cold mornings, under the eyes of Miss Nilson and Mr. Bechtold, the cast of flower girls and boy knights would learn their moves in the gym, and every afternoon at four it would fill again with “the sprightly figures of the dancers” rehearsing their parts. Excitement followed the casting of role after role: the villainous Duke of Brabant, the Court Fool, Elsa, even Lohengrin himself.
Even beyond the planned dance drama on the lake, Professor Bechtold was bringing new luster to Portland theater. He decided to direct the Harold Brighouse comedy Hobson’s Choice at the Little Theatre downtown (James was in the stage crew), and he sent to San Francisco for costumes. “The production will have touches of professionalism,” according to the Quest, “very seldom found in amateur performances.” In April, Bechtold took the stage himself, playing the part of Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which the cast wore historically accurate sixteenth-century dress. Everything Bechtold touched seemed to shimmer.
As excitement mounted for The Swan Knight, new details leaked. The audience would be seated on the lawn, amid giant evergreens. A boat would be decorated to look like a large swan, for the hero to arrive on Crystal Springs Lake. “Lohengrin, born on the lake,” the Morning Oregonian reported in late May, “arrives on the back of a swan.” The paper noted again that Bechtold’s great pantomime dance was the first of its kind to be presented in the Northwest. The performance was less than three weeks away. A reporter from the Quest saw final rehearsals and called them very promising.
And then, suddenly: nothing. In the Portland papers, in the Quest—not a word of Professor Bechtold’s never-seen Wagnerian extravaganza on Crystal Springs Lake. In late May, about the time the students were in final rehearsal, a small item appeared in the student paper: “The announcement that Mr. Edmund Bechtold will enter the business field at the conclusion of the present semester came as a surprise to his Reed friends today. Mr. Bechtold has as yet made no binding connections, but he hopes to remain in the Northwest, with headquarters possibly in Portland.” The German department was to be folded into Romance Languages under one head (to be named).
Bechtold had been at Reed only eight months. Inexplicably, his teaching career appeared to be over. For good.
The notice of the professor’s departure ended with a businesslike farewell, striking for its coolness: “Mr. Bechtold’s Reed friends wish him the best of luck in his future undertakings.” Whoever his friends were, they didn’t appear to include the administration. Nor did they include James, technically, since he had ceased, quietly, to be a student at Reed sometime in the middle of March 1921.
He was gone by April, when the yearbook photographer showed up at the farmhouse on Woodstock Road to shoot the men of House I. The only evidence that he’d been a student that year lingered in the freshman class portrait, taken at the beginning of the fall semester, in a couple of Reed play credits, and in a memory of his dunking in the lake at the frosh-soph tug-of-war. James, never inconspicuous, had been all but erased.
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AT THE BEGINNING OF 1921, Reed was an institution acutely sensitive to Portland’s politics. Many in the city had been wary of William Trufant Foster’s moralizing and modern notions of social engineering. The college, which was just emerging from financial insecurity, was under public scrutiny.
Always staid, Reed was becoming conservative. Now, a different guest minister from one of Portland’s churches would give a sermon in chapel on Fridays. And in February, after a yearlong search, the college’s board of regents announced they’d found a new president, a man who would bring stability and a reinvigorated spirit to Reed.
Dr. Richard Frederick Scholz was a man of wisdom, family values, and steady demeanor. He wore a patchy mustache that made him look younger than his actual age (forty-one), and he had calm but determined eyes that peered through wire-rimmed spectacles. Scholz’s formal tenure would begin April 1, but in mid-February—when James was feeling his most openly rebellious and Bechtold was starting work on The Swan Knight—Scholz paid an unannounced visit to campus. He stood in the commons, greeting students and faculty. Later he met privately with the trustees to discuss pressing business. Though it probably wasn’t on the agenda that day, the reverberations from a nine-year-old gay-sex scandal in Portland were still rattling the windows of the Old Dorm Block.
On the night of November 8, 1912, Portland police arrested nineteen-year-old Benjamin Trout for suspected petty crime. Interrogating officers noted how frightened Trout seemed. Before long, he’d not only admitted the theft he was picked up for, but he’d also confessed he was part of a local subculture of homosexuals, with links to similar communities in cities up and down the West Coast.
Trout described performing sexual acts with several men in Portland, and not with the loggers, hobos, and immigrants the press often cast as degenerates lurking in the vice district. Trout revealed an invisible ring of respectable white men who were queer: shop clerks, businessmen, lawyers. Most shocking of all was disclosure that many rented rooms at the Portland YMCA, seemingly the most wholesome of residences for upstanding young men.
The local papers exposed this secret world of debauchery with screaming headlines. ROTTEN SCANDAL REACHES INTO THE Y.M.C.A., blared the front page of the Portland News, a muckraking populist daily. The story was shocking: An insidious ring of sexually deviant men—the so-called Vice Clique—had seeped into the city’s institutions, corrupting good boys from decent families. These villains, enemies of Portland’s values of honest work and progressivism, were impossible to spot. They moved freely, even at the highest levels of society. Most Portland voters ascribed to a brand of Republican populism that painted homosexual men as part of some corrupt liberal elite, rich businessmen and capitalists intent on exploiting an honest working class.
When Oscar Wilde went on trial in 1895 for gross indecency, the Portland papers pointed to it as proof of the moral decay of the Old World. Such crimes could never happen in America, least of all the Pacific Northwest, where the bracing wind of a brash and energetic young society, faithful to industry and worship, starved the ancient vices of their putrid air. OUR MORALS ARE BETTER THAN EUROPE’S, claimed a headline in the Oregon Sunday Journal in October 1912, weeks before the YMCA scandal broke. At least Americans, the newspaper’s editors argued, “have the grace to be ashamed of their sins.”
What if there were truly shameless men with easy access to the innocent young, though? What would happen if members of this Vice Clique infiltrated schools and colleges, inculcating this deathly culture of sin in a new generation?
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TO EVADE POLICE, men tagged by informants as members of the Vice Clique scattered as far south as Los Angeles and as far north as Vancouver, British Columbia. Some fled all the way to New York City, where they hoped to find anonymity. In Portland, there were roundups at the Bohemian Restaurant, where Elizabeth sometimes took James. A Hungarian violinist, Jansci “Gypsy” Rigó, on an extended engagement from Paris, was arrested at Theodore Kruse’s Louvre. (Six months later, the scandal-plagued Louvre closed for good.) Sixty-eight men were implicated in the scandal. Several men picked up by the police received sodomy convictions; most served long prison sentences. Those lucky enough to be fined, or even acquitted, struggled to repair their shattered reputations. Moving and changing one’s name seemed to be the only solution.
William Allen, a fifty-one-year-old single businessman who lived at the Portland Y, botched a suicide attempt. Swept up in the raids, he wasn’t charged with any crime, but the mere taint of suspicion got him fired from a job he’d held for twenty-seven years. Someone leaked his suicide note to the Portland News. The paper ran it with the headline, SCANDAL MAY BRING DEATH.
“I am innocent,” he wrote, “but the disgrace is more than I can bear. There are circumstances that look unfavorable, but there are any number of young men who can tell of my helpfulness to them. Any way I see it, my life is ruined. I have tried to do my best.” Even a shadow of suspicion branded a man for life. It made him an outcast.
At the age of eight—about a year after he realized he liked boys—James heard about the scandal from his mother. Two friends of Elizabeth’s had been swept up in the furore. James would overhear her discuss it with her friends in lowered voices, and the conclusion was always the same: One could do as one liked, as long as one lived within the social conventions. The important thing was never, ever getting caught.
When the Vice Clique scandal broke, Reed president William Trufant Foster took immediate action. Like other enlightened people, Foster believed that any innocent could succumb to the lure of homosexual acts. Few of us were actually born depraved. Any young man, through proximity and weak resolve, could catch the disease of degeneracy, a contagion like any other. The solution was disinfectant, in the form of education, liberally applied. A young man must be taught the proper use of sex in marriage. Or, if he were to remain a bachelor, how to manage—alone—this evolutionary imperative to carry on the species.
In 1913, Foster and eleven other distinguished speakers presented a lecture series, “Sexual Hygiene and Morals,” at a downtown Portland hotel. These became the seed that would grow into public schools’ sex-education curriculum—focused on the proper, lawful use of sex between men and women—begun in Oregon as a response to the Vice Clique scandal. For many years, authorities in Portland were concerned with making sure that the evil of homosexuality would find no welcome in their city.
Elizabeth attended a few of these lectures, one of which held up masturbation as a mechanism to keep young men from giving in to homosexual temptations and other forms of vice. At the Gearhart Park cottage one day, after James turned fourteen, she asked him whether he ever masturbated, and she insisted that if anyone ever told him he’d grow hair on his hand from the practice, he was not to believe them. Embarrassed, James lied. He told his mother he would never even consider so dreadful a thing as masturbation. Frankly, he told her, it sounded awfully boring.
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AT ABOUT THE TIME Richard Scholz was arriving at Reed with his wife and three young children, Oregon’s legislature passed a eugenics law. All men convicted of sodomy—“moral degenerates and sexual perverts”—would undergo forced sterilization. (Oregon’s law would stay on the books until 1983. Over the course of enforcement, 2,648 people were known to have been sterilized: 1,713 women and 935 men. The law applied to three groups: the mentally and physically disabled, those convicted of three or more felonies, and so-called sexual deviants, of whom homosexual men made up the largest group.)
Even if Scholz had been sympathetic, personally, to the case of a popular freshman boy caught in an act of oral indecency with a professor in his room in an old farmhouse where every sound carried, and on a Sunday when the two offenders thought they’d be undisturbed, apart from a parrot squawking at every creak of a bed, it was a case that had to be dealt with decisively. If the Portland papers ever caught a whiff, suspected even a hint of scandal, it could imperil the already tenuous existence of Reed College. The populist tide was against sympathy.
When it came to students mingling with faculty, maybe the Reed that Scholz inherited was too permissive. A spoofy item in the Quest told of a student who transferred to Princeton. “While yet unfamiliar with the local color and eastern social custom,” the story read, “he entertained his major professor in his room. The Reed man was immediately viewed askance by his fellows, and eventually ostracized for his daring unconventionality. Reed,” it concluded, “is singularly free from the bondage of conventionality.” Scholz’s task was to make his institution more conventional. He had to deal with this sensitive disciplinary item at once, and do it quietly, without any notoriety.
Besides, private justice would be nothing new for Reed. It happened in the case of a facilities engineer, a man who’d worked at the college for five years and was entrusted with keys to all the locks on campus. The engineer was found to have stolen kitchen supplies, a Liberty bond (from one of the gardeners), cash, and even candy from the student co-op. Instead of alerting the police, Reed administrators required the man to find a new job off campus and pay fifty dollars every two weeks until he made full restitution. Why wouldn’t the college deal extrajudiciously in a far more delicate case? In the furious antihomosexual climate of Portland, a quiet solution may have been the most progressive one.
James’s expulsion happened so quietly it almost seemed he chose to leave, drifting invisibly off, as though one day he’d decided to move home and stop going to class. If anyone ever raised questions, there’d be a formal record of insufficient performance, dated to January 1921 (before the new term started). As for the professor, his firing would have to be handled even more delicately, delivered to the papers as a sudden decision on the man’s part to leave academia behind. Forever.
And so the incident at Reed came noiselessly to an end. Dr. Scholz embarked on a well-publicized train blitz through the West to find new teachers. The Rockefeller Foundation had given the college a grant, on the condition that it meet a high minimum from local endowment drives. For the college to survive, then, its local standing would have to stay lofty.
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EDMUND BECHTOLD STAYED in Portland, still active in theater. He was elected president of the Portland Players, an amateur drama group. He became an ad man and started his own agency, Edmund C. Bechtold and Associates. With his commanding looks and theatrical training, he was a popular speaker at advertising club luncheons in towns across the state.
James moved back to Salmon Street. On the afternoon he arrived, with the clouds so thick it seemed like night had fallen outside the screened back porch, he sat with his mother at the kitchen table. He told her everything. For the first and only time as an adult, he cried in her presence. Elizabeth was angry at James only for having succumbed to such a foolish indiscretion. She was furious with Reed. They agreed not to tell John, only to give him the official explanation that James’s grades had been poor. She asked James how he would live, now that college seemed unlikely. He said he wanted to pursue theater, perhaps learn to become a great tenor from the teacher Cecil Fanning had recommended.
Years later, a friend would observe of James that he hated being gay. Perhaps what he really hated was bearing the wounds of being gay in a world that never let them scar over. The college imprinted itself on him in a short time. He resented Reed, or at least its cowardice in offering him up for sacrifice to suit political expediency. And yet James considered Reed his alma mater, the institution that cemented his sense of himself as a Westerner, free of snobberies and pretension, full of vigor and democratic ideals. Like Gearhart, Reed College was a place where James felt a deep sense of belonging. Being forced to leave it would haunt James for the rest of his life—as if he were Lohengrin in the swan boat on a dark lake, except that James was being ferried to a shore he feared he’d never reach, and without a chorus to mark the journey.