CHAPTER 5
EARLY PEAS AND OTHER PRIVATE PLEASURES
1923–1933
SHE WAS NOT A SHIP to stoke romantic notions of travel on the high seas. The Highland Heather was a serviceable old tank: an old-fashioned pair of masts, a single smokestack painted in red and black stripes, and only the most basic passenger amenities. She was a slow-moving tank, plowing south through the warm Pacific somewhere off the tropical coast of Mexico.
And she reeked of apples—hundreds of thousands of apples. If James never ate another, it would be too soon.
Except that food on the ship was so dreary, the cooking a daily onslaught of gray provisions, all of them boiled—beef, cabbage, dumplings. An apple, peeled and cut up with a pocket knife, was the only gleam of luster. James had only ever traveled on statelier steamships (to San Francisco with his mother, exactly twice), where the cooking was decent even in tourist class. On the Highland Heather, food was merely something to keep the thirty paying passengers alive until they all debarked in England, six weeks after leaving Portland.
On the first day of February 1923, they pushed off from the Willamette River dock, bound for Southampton via the Panama Canal. The Highland Heather originated in Seattle, where workers loaded into the ship’s refrigerated hold sixty thousand boxes of Washington’s finest apples for the European market. Another sixty thousand were hauled aboard in Portland.
The Highland Heather dated from the previous century, when she hauled beef from Argentina to London; later she was armored and pressed into service in the Great War. The Huns torpedoed her, though not fatally. After the armistice, the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company patched her up and put her back in the water. She plied the only direct passenger route between British ports and the Pacific Northwest, with stops in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Twenty-year-old James bunked with John V. Bennes Jr., twenty-one, son of a well-known Portland architect. They knew each other well, having performed in amateur drama leagues together, and shared a small cabin in the spartan “intermediate” class. Both carried letters of recommendation from George Natanson, director of one of those drama leagues, the Red Lantern Players. In London, Natanson’s letters were to be presented to the head of vocal training at the Royal Academy of Music, one of the world’s finest institutions for musical study. Both James and Bennes were seeking opera training. Both dreamed of becoming stars on the world stage.
Though the Highland Heather was nothing more than a rusty apple tank with bad food and a crew of men from all over Europe, including a Dutch cook and British scullery mates, it represented James’s best hope for redemption.
It had been almost two depressed years since James’s exile from Reed: two years in which he seemed to be doing little else but marking time. It wasn’t just the de facto expulsion that stung. James might have recovered relatively quickly were it only that. It was the erasure that came with it: hardly a word about him in the yearbook, a cruel wiping of James from the record. And because of what? Yielding in a moment of weakness? Trusting a man who was supposed to protect him?
Before being banished, James’s momentum had seemed inevitable. He had always been an awkward boy, assertive—mischievous and even joky—on the outside, while inside suffering from loneliness and self-doubt, long spells of unshakable sadness. The stage had taught him to show himself, to vanquish self-consciousness by magnifying who he was and to raise his voice. He’d learned how to act the confident rebel, striding toward an inevitable future on the New York stage. All that had been wiped away.
That year, James went to live at the beach alone, weeks before his mother arrived. The journey in the day coach was quiet so early in spring, plus the highway between Portland and Seaside was all but completed. For those who had one, an automobile was now the preferred transport to the coast, despite the last few jolting miles of dirt road. Progress seemed to conspire with circumstances to leave James behind.
At the cottage, he cooked clam hash and baked biscuits in the treacherous range he tried to master. He was used to eating by himself; living alone at the beach in the quiet season gave him time and room to reflect. Gearhart’s community of year-rounders, however, was tight-knit. If grocer Jim Cutler asked why he’d come to the beach before the end of the term at Reed, James would have been forced to lie and say he’d finished early and been given permission to leave. James sought to avoid anyone he knew. He climbed Tillamook Head, and even though the humiliation of having been caught was still fresh, he strolled at night through Strawberry Knoll, where solo men loitered in the hope of meeting interested strangers, and where James had given up his virginity years earlier.
He read Turgenev and Tolstoy. He swam daily, disappearing under the waves far from shore. Someone took his picture on the beach in front of the Gearhart natatorium. James is in his bathing suit, which is still wet. Even as he smiles, he looks pained, as though worried his thighs are lumpy and too large, his hair in need of combing. It’s the photograph of someone who fears he’s revealing too much; of a young man trying to look affable, though in fact he’s acutely uncomfortable in his flesh.
James was physically unlike other men, and not just because he was husky and tall. He knew it from a young age, when he’d go skinny-dipping with Gearhart boys in shallow stretches of the Necanicum River.
Other men had equipment that seemed to work differently than his; had male parts that looked different than his, in all their lovely hugeness. The trouble was, the tender skin that sheathed James’s never grew as it should have. It did not keep up with the growth of James’s body—almost as though it had gotten stuck at a particularly obstinate stage of development and refused to budge. And when his penis was mature enough to react spontaneously to excitement, the tightness in the skin didn’t ease, so that whatever pleasure James felt always registered through a filter of pain. In the complicated realm of sex, maybe his destiny lay in giving pleasure to others; his reward would be the feeling—a sense of satisfaction—that he’d made another happy, and to feel love, which he knew so little of and must, surely, have craved.
: : :
JAMES RETURNED TO Salmon Street weeks after the summer season ended. His father was away, making a tour of customs houses for the government. In fall, along the banks of the Willamette not far from Reed, geese fly south in darkened skies swirled with clouds. There are whiffs of smoke, smoldering piles of leaves raked from beneath maples and sycamores. Everything in the landscape, even the air itself, evokes change and a sense of inevitable movement, of a narrative that has turned. Thoughts of the school term well underway surely troubled James. Did anyone at Reed still remember him?
James tried reviving his burgeoning career in theater. He had already started doing charity shows, entertaining residents at a home for the destitute called Multnomah Farm. He and the other performers called themselves The Joy Club. James sang. One of The Joy Club’s female members read O. Henry stories. Afterward, they served refreshments. It was hardly a matter of picking up where James left off, but he had to start somewhere. Momentum is a force that won’t reactivate at will.
Elizabeth prodded him to join a committee that was planning a dance for young people in the parish house at Trinity Church. He auditioned for a lavish new play that would be performed before the General Convention of the Episcopal Church. Titled A Sinner Beloved, it was a dramatization of the story of the Prophet Hosea. James got a nonspeaking role as one of the sinners, a seller of slaves. The auditorium where he performed wasn’t even full.
“Hosea of old was a prophet of fierceness,” explained the review next morning in the Oregon Daily Journal, “holding that God was severe and the punishment of the sinner would be without mercy. Gloomy and wrathful he spread gloom over those who surrounded him.” Charity acts and church pageants: They felt to James like rites of penance the world expected him to perform.
James’s deliverance came from George Natanson, founder of the amateur Portland Drama League and its spinoff, the Red Lantern Players. In the spring of 1922, Natanson cast James at Turn Verein Hall in This Way, Please, a one-act drama by a local playwright. Natanson saw more of what James could do a few weeks later, on St. Patrick’s Day, when James wore a leprechaun costume and sang Irish songs at a PTA benefit. In May, Natanson gave James his most prestigious role yet, in the drama Nothing But the Truth, costarring the celebrated actor Earle E. Larrimore.
Natanson liked what he saw in James, the young man’s mix of energy and bravado. All he needed was finessing, under a teacher who could help him harness his natural instincts. James could go to New York and find a good teacher there—someone who could work on both his voice and his acting. Or he could look higher.
Natanson was a good friend of Carl Denton, conductor of the Portland Symphony Orchestra, who had studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London and cited his education at the conservatory as exceptional. Not only that, Denton had been honored as the academy’s official representative in Portland. Why, Natanson wondered, couldn’t James pursue his training there? Why shouldn’t Portland be the western capital of musical theater, with a constellation of rigorously trained young stars?
Elizabeth needed no convincing. She, too, was still smarting from James’s expulsion, still eager to prove to Reed College—and the world—that her son was a budding artist far too great for a town as provincial as Portland. Besides, London would be good for the boy. He could stay with her brother Fred and his wife, in their flat.
It wasn’t possible to enroll at the Royal Academy from a distance of five thousand miles. James and another of Natanson’s Red Lantern protégés, John Bennes Jr., would need to travel to London to audition for places in the summer session. So Natanson wrote letters of recommendation and vouched for James to the Secretary of State in Washington, DC, on his passport application, supporting James’s request to go to Europe to pursue vocal studies.
And so, somewhere off the Pacific coast of Mexico, on an old steamer with a battered, sour-sounding piano in the lounge, James worked to memorize his audition piece: Puccini’s “No! Pazzo son!” from Manon Lescaut. Trying to ignore the reek of apples.
: : :
THE HIGHLAND HEATHER reached St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands at the end of February. The town of Charlotte Amalie rose from the harbor as a stack of pastel stucco houses behind white-painted wood verandas. They clustered within a vertical rise of low palms, the fronds splayed and drooping in the heat. Behind them sprawled a wider landscape of soft, barren hills. The ship had docked in the quiet harbor for an afternoon of provisioning. In dripping humidity, a human chain of loaders (women in long skirts, men in stained undershirts and rolled-leg trousers) portered sixty-pound baskets of coal on their heads, promenading up the gangplank to add their cargoes to the ship’s bunker.
James and Bennes had debarked and ambled through the port, past sweaty US sailors in dungaree suits and slouchy white caps. They climbed the main street to the colonnaded Grand Hotel and its dim dining room troubled with flies. There they ordered a luncheon of gristly entrecôtes and potatoes fried in questionable oil. Nothing was delicious, but it was a relief to be eating away from the ship. A waiter rolled up with a cart of rattling bottles and fixed them drinks known as Swizzles: dark St. Croix rum, juice of sweet Spanish limes, Cointreau, and sugar, mixed in glasses of slushy ice by means of a wooden molinillo, which the man twirled between his palms. Thank God that Prohibition, with its throat-scouring gins and beers like water squeezed from washrags, was behind them.
After lunch, the men split up. James strolled aimlessly, tipsy from rum and heat. A street opened to a throng of locals, natives of color: a girl goading an unfazed donkey saddled with baskets of coconuts, men with flat caps and rolled sleeves, women in wide-brimmed hats of woven palmetto and forearms laden with baskets, dogs scratching at fleas or sleeping fitfully in the roadway—an outdoor food market. It stretched along a raised concrete platform in a clearing of houses, under a swooping canopy like that of a train station from the last century, held aloft by cast-iron columns of Greco-Roman design. Dozens of women selling fruits and vegetables squatted on low stools, shooing flies with palm fans. James saw his chance and seized it. He bought two baskets.
One he packed with a mix of small pickling cucumbers and deep-red, musky, juice-filled tomatoes no bigger across than the length of his pinkie. Into the other basket he wedged clusters of tiny fig bananas, pygmy pineapples, Spanish limes like the ones at the restaurant, and cashew apples with the nuts—kidney-shaped brown drupes—still dangling. He selected melons: compact and orange-fleshed, with a perfume so strong it had a hypnotic effect on James, blotting out every other field of his attention. He loved the market women, how they laughed with good nature at his curiosity, joked about his size and supposed appetite. They told him how to eat the curious things called ackee and what to do with cassava. They pulled his sleeve so he’d come see what fruits they’d spread out on old coffee sacks: guavas and tamarind pods, star apples and noni fruit. There were greens called callaloo he’d never seen at home, and christophenes (chayotes) shaped like clenched fists. He was curious about it all. He regretted there was only so much he could try.
He hauled his baskets on board the ship. For the next ten days, until the Highland Heather puffed into the harbor of Ponta Delgada in the Azores, James and Bennes and another passenger, Charles Woodhouse, a baker from Liverpool likewise unimpressed with the ship’s cooking, ate through James’s island larder. They had salads of cucumber and tomato that James cut up with a pocketknife and dressed with lime; desserts of banana, pineapple, and cashew apple, doused with the earthy island rum that Bennes had picked up.
James marveled at how the fruits and vegetables that grew in a place—the ones that gave it a particular flavor—amplified his experience of having been there. How taste made the vividness of certain landscapes resound, long after he had left them. How the truck-farm ingredients of a place, sold by poor women with cracked hands, could be so rich and expressive.
: : :
JAMES REACHED LONDON at the end of March. For three weeks in the front parlor of his aunt and uncle’s flat in West London, he rehearsed Puccini. At last, on the day he had to sing for the opera admissions panel, everything went wrong. It was a rainy April morning and he left his umbrella behind in the crowded Underground car, so he was wet when he arrived at the recital hall. The room—with its chandeliers and cream moldings, its vast vaulted ceiling—intimidated James, making him feel like a Portland boy dropped into a thrilling but unsteady dream, confused about how he’d gotten there. Then the pianist’s tempo was half a beat too fast, and James became flustered. He struggled to reach even a middle C.
The panel rejected his application.
He asked whether he could try again, but that was explicitly against the rules. James was humiliated, demoralized. What’s worse, John Bennes’s audition went spectacularly well.
James wrote to Elizabeth with the sickening sense he’d been through this before, after the doors to Reed College slammed shut behind him. James was embarrassed. He feared he was worthless, incapable of securing a future for himself. He hadn’t booked his passage back home, assuming that after studying at the conservatory he’d stay in London to begin a career on the stage. Now what? Rush back home on another broken barge in defeat?
To feel better, he took himself to the downstairs bar at the Ritz. Because he didn’t know what else to ask for, and because he’d read about them in magazine stories about England, he ordered whisky-soda, a boring drink.
He’d noticed a woman at a table nearby, sitting with two young men, both with sleek, shining hair. One man flashed a slightly lingering look at James, who thought perhaps it was because he, James, was dressed wrong: in a darker, heavier suit than spring warranted. The woman, maybe in her early thirties, had a rather long, elegant face, dark eyes, and beautifully sculpted cheeks. She kept erupting in laughter. Soon, James realized they were talking about him. The other man, the one not glancing at James, rose and approached his table. Saying that James looked awfully lonely, he asked if he’d care to join them. The woman introduced herself as Helen Dircks and said she hoped he didn’t mind them staring, but he looked so much like a lost little American boy in need of a good drink.
Helen was a writer, author of two books of Imagist poetry, both fairly well received, published during and just after the war. Her father was Will H. Dircks, the distinguished drama critic and editor. When James met her, she’d just divorced the novelist Frank Arthur Swinnerton. Because she needed a job, she’d recently become an advertising copywriter and publicist for The Palladium, the West End variety theater with a grand classical façade, all Corinthian columns and statues throwing heroic poses along the pediment.
Helen moved in a circle of theater people, artists, and interesting characters, chaps who loitered in cafés and small restaurants in Soho. Many, like the men James met that night at the Ritz, were queer. By the time the evening ended, and James headed back to Uncle Fred’s in Acton Vale, he’d become Helen’s little project: the funny, corn-fed nineteen-year-old from Portland, Oregon (she said it like Orry-gawn), a stranger in the cruel British metropolis, who dreamed of becoming a great singer and needed some nice English boys to play with. She’d have to see what she could do.
Oh, and it was essential that she teach him how to order a proper cocktail.
: : :
UNDER HELEN’S WING, James came to adore London. He so loved the view from Victoria Embankment, on a Sunday afternoon when the sun made the river turn the oxide green of old window glass, afloat with orange tugs and coal barges in lazy flotillas. The haze through which any glimpse of London was filtered—its skyline of spires and shipping cranes, the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben—made the city feel edged with cashmere. Men in soft-shouldered suits with fawn caps or light-brown fedoras; women in pale, pleat-skirted springtime coats and cloche hats of delphinium pink or blue: London had a scale and a smartness James never dreamed existed. It made even Meier & Frank, Portland’s most stylish department store, seem dinky and provincial.
In James’s eyes, Soho was nothing short of magical. Helen took him to lunch at Gennaro’s Rendezvous on Dean Street. It was there, in the faux–Olde English farmhouse dining room, with its black ceiling beams, bank of small-paned cottage windows, and high-backed rush-weave chairs, that Helen ordered James his first London dry martini (three parts gin, one of vermouth). They ate sole Rendezvous (in white wine sauce) and soufflé Gallina (named for the restaurant’s previous owner), with brandied cherries and an amber puddle of Cognac, flambéed at the table with high theatrics. James was enraptured. James was drunk.
Through her gay friends, Helen gave James an entrée into London’s discreet queer subculture, something he hungered for without even daring to hope that such a thing could exist, or what it would feel like, what its rules and language were. Queers in the other great European capitals flaunted their existence. There were drag balls and openly gay beer bars in Berlin, and male hustling on radical display in the Left Bank cafés of Paris. London was different. Police raids were constant. The queer city blossomed at night, in the dark. London’s gay scene operated more like a network of speakeasies. One had to be tipped off about where to find the alley tea shop of boys in berets and colored sweaters, some wearing rouge and lipstick; or the basement bar of quiet yet purposeful men in crisp suits and bowler hats with tightly rolled umbrellas. The hunt for these places alone was thrilling.
The hotspots were usually takeovers of existing places: the monumental marble bar at the Trocadero; the basement bar at the Criterion Hotel in Piccadilly Circus. Queer men had been stopping in for drinks at the Criterion, amid the neo-Byzantine splendor of its mosaics and arches, almost since the death of Queen Victoria more than two decades earlier. (It had camp nicknames: the Witches’ Cauldron for its bitchiness; or the Bargain Basement, since the men could be had so cheaply.) Another place, though James didn’t know it the night he met Helen and her friends there, was the downstairs bar at the Ritz. Gay regulars called it l’Abri, the Vault, a place locked away from the dangers of the nonqueer world. Subterranean bars were London’s queer cocoons, incubator sites for pleasure and discovery, as remote as possible from the cruel and risky street. James found recognition and safety there. He learned the culture of cocktails, and of camp.
Even the galleries off the rococo lobby of the Palladium, Helen’s client, were places where men found each other; where they could lock gazes and discreetly grope beneath raincoats folded over arms, especially during the blare and pyrotechnics at the climax of the popular Rockets revue, when the audience’s eyes would be focused on the stage. The body language in these establishments, the queer code, was subtle but undeniable. Even on the streets of the West End, a daring man might telegraph his queerness by walking with his overcoat slung behind one shoulder. One simply had to know how to read the signals.
Besides, London was a city of nearly invisible secret pleasures. James stumbled on Covent Garden Market while en route to the Royal Opera House. After that, he returned again and again in the early mornings to see it bustling with Cockney sellers who haggled with customers, drily roasted them sometimes, and even clapped the rude ones out of the market entirely. In May, Early Warwick peas came in: crates of them from Sussex, small and shining when you stripped open a pod. The strange thing was, in the two weeks they appeared at Covent Garden, James never once saw them on a restaurant menu, certainly not on his uncle and aunt’s table, where only sulfurous cabbages and sprouts, obliterated to almost-mush in the boiling kettle, represented all of the vegetable kingdom besides potatoes. Someone in London was eating those peas.
James bought a large basketful. Following the advice of a market woman, he left them whole and boiled them quickly, lifted each by the stalk end to gave it a dip in melted butter before sucking out the peas. They were extraordinary, as good as (or better than) ones he knew from the coast of Oregon. He imagined thousands of others doing the same thing that night, quietly, at kitchen tables across the vast city, from sacks of early peas bought from greengrocers: a map of cravings satisfied in private.
: : :
JAMES OWED HELEN a huge debt, too, for salvaging his hopes for operatic training. She dropped a line to Gaetano Loria, a vocal teacher she knew, asking whether he’d be willing to talk to a promising young American arrived in London to become a tenor. Just shy of fifty, Loria was a Sicilian with a questionable past, though in England he’d built a reputation as a great impresario of Milan’s La Scala, a maestro who groomed singers for glory.
Loria grew up in a village on the slopes of Mount Etna. In Milan, he was secretary to the soprano Ada Giachetti, who in 1910 ended a long, illicit liaison with Enrico Caruso. After the breakup, Giachetti sued Caruso for compensation, and in a messy, complicated trial, Caruso accused Giachetti, Loria, and an associate of extortion and slander. A court in Milan absolved Loria of perjury but found he’d bribed witnesses. He was ordered to pay damages. The trial exposed Loria as a money-grubber and a snake. And it revealed he’d once begged Caruso to hire him as his secretary, but he was so incompetent the tenor had no choice but to fire him.
Hoping for a new start, Loria moved to England in 1914. He advertised himself not only as the great Caruso’s onetime personal secretary but also as the master of bel canto, a man who’d trained some of the greatest singers who appeared at La Scala. He landed a job teaching elocution to officer cadets at Sandhurst Military College. Someone noticed him and thought there might be a chance he could help the Duke of York, Britain’s future King George VI, a man desperate to overcome his stammering and fear of public speaking. He did not cure the duke. For Loria, it was a great success anyway, since the fact of royal patronage gave him status, along with the ability to charge his pupils almost whatever he liked.
The man James went to see was short, round, and jovial. Loria had prospered in England. Six months earlier, he had moved from Notting Hill Gate to a studio above Wigmore Hall, the esteemed chamber music and vocal concert venue in Marylebone, an address that only added to his luster. He took pupils in London and once a year opened a temporary studio in Manchester.
James and the self-styled maestro came to an agreement. For the next two and a half months, he would have twice-weekly private lessons on the production of voice, as well as the diction and interpretation of English, French, and Italian songs and operas. Madame Loria, her husband’s manager, demanded the first month in advance before scheduling James’s first appointment. After James paid, Loria suggested they celebrate their felicitous new arrangement by having James take them to luncheon at one of Loria’s favorite restaurants in London: Gennaro’s in New Compton Street.
As a restaurateur, Gennaro (who also owned the Rendezvous) was an impresario. He’d been a dancer in Milan, but now his restaurants were his stage. Since his days of performing in ballet tights, he’d grown large—weighing well over two hundred pounds and wearing a tuxedo. He shaved his head bald and shiny with a razor. He had a prominent mustache, eyebrows died raven black, and a sharp little nose that angled down, like the beak on a mask for carnevale. Gennaro had a film actor’s control over his facial muscles, raising a single eyebrow, for instance, to greet a distinguished guest like Signor Loria, accompanied by his newest pupil. When a lady entered, no matter where Gennaro was in the dining room, he’d pivot with practiced grace and virtually glide across the floor to the restaurant’s small foyer, where he’d present her with a single carnation. He was famous for presenting one to every woman who entered, which Gennaro called out in advertisements. “The restaurant,” read one ad, beneath a photograph of the mustached proprietor embracing a lady wearing a Spanish mantilla and gripping a lace fan, “where you are greeted with a smile and a flower.”
James found the lunch astonishing. It was his first taste of Italian food outside Portland or San Francisco. Milanese cooking, for the most part, though tailored for English people: no garlic, or only a whiff, and nothing too vivid. (Italians, however—singers performing at Covent Garden, such as Mattia Battistini, the aging King of Baritones, and the great tenor Beniamino Gigli—did dine a Gennaro. For them, the chef cooked dishes not on the regular menu.) It was an antipasto freddo that made the strongest impression on James: a chilled tomato, skinned and hollowed out, filled with a thick chunk of cold lobster, a poached egg with the yolk just set, and a spoonful of mayonnaise.
The brilliance of Gennaro’s wasn’t so much the food as it was the performance, an actor spinning magic so convincingly that the audience came to believe in his mastery. Not just the cooking; that, plus the smile and the flower and the maestro’s unchallengeable air of authority. Gennaro made an indelible impression on James.
The Royal Academy of Music had been a bust, but James had found something better, he wrote his mother: personal instruction from a man who’d worked side-by-side with the genius Caruso and had mentored an actual royal. Elizabeth’s money (which, incidentally, she’d need to wire more of) was not going to waste—which she’d be able to judge for herself, she wrote back to say, since she’d booked passage to Southampton on the Canadian Pacific Line steamship Melita, leaving from Montreal and arriving the first of June. She was interested to hear what James had learned from this shockingly expensive Signor Loria.
: : :
ELIZABETH CAME AND WENT. She told him she approved of Loria, whom James now called Tano. He’d studied about a dozen baritone roles (a new one every week), including Schaunard from La Bohème, Escamillo from Carmen, Tonio and Silvio from I Pagliacci, Ford from Falstaff.
James took his mother to Gennaro’s for the stuffed tomato, which she adored as he knew she would, since she loved simple cold dishes. She spent most of her time with her brother Fred. James rode with her on the train to Wiltshire one Sunday to visit her sister (his aunt) and have tea: currant-studded buns, homemade bread with butter as good or better than Grace Harris’s and wild bramble jam. It was impressive and stupefying.
Elizabeth, who’d once spurned her siblings, embraced them in old age. She wept when she and James left to catch the train home. Soon Elizabeth was off to stay with another sister, who lived in Kent, in the port town of Folkestone on the English Channel. James was impatient for her to leave, impatient to resume his life in the West End. It was agreed he’d take some weeks to visit Paris, after his lessons with Tano had ended. Elizabeth gave him some money. She warned him it would be the last. And yet she wasn’t done trying to prepare for his future.
At the end of July 1923, the music page of the Oregon Sunday Journal ran the item LONDON HEARS PORTLAND BOY IN CONCERT. It reported that James had sung five numbers in front of an audience at Wigmore Hall. Though eleven of Loria’s students sang that night, James—perhaps because Loria didn’t think James’s vocal skills reflected well on the master—wasn’t one of them. And Elizabeth, home from abroad, would have found it easy to send a bogus notice to the music editor of the Sunday Journal. Who would know it was false? Elizabeth and James both had too much pride to let something as insignificant as facts keep them from telling the truth as they saw it.
: : :
JAMES’S STRUGGLE FOR a life in theater was fruitless and frustrating. He would explain away his operatic failures as bad luck. In London, he said, he’d developed nodules—growths like callouses—in the folds of his vocal chords, a result of working too hard, too fast. That Loria had pushed him to learn the role of Wolfram in Tannhäuser, James would explain, pushed him and pushed him until he had an overworked voice and reached a state of exhaustion. That Loria had decided to make James a Wagnerian tenor in the mold of Lauritz Melchior, but alas: nodules. James would say he’d proven himself a good singer; that his performance at Wigmore Hall had been a complete success. What more could he have done? He had an alibi.
The truth nagged him nonetheless.
There was no night of triumph at Wigmore Hall, no training at the Royal Academy, no Melchior path to glory. After Elizabeth left him in London, he’d taken the money she gave him and drifted across to Paris for six weeks, ostensibly to meet up with a vocal teacher who could ease his troubled chords. In fact, James wanted to taste his freedom even more completely than he’d done in London, where he got the flavor of the queer city lurking just beneath the conventional one. There, he was staying with relatives for those four months, still under the gaze of family. In Paris, city of legendary pleasures, he knew no one, which gave James a thrilling sense of possibility. All he had were the names and telephone numbers of men Helen Dircks had told him to look up, a pair of English friends not much older than James. She said he’d get on with them. She said they’d show him around.
He stayed at a pension on the Left Bank’s rue Jacob (near rue Bonaparte), a street of four-story houses with garrets and rather rickety-looking shutters flanking the tall windows. His room had a narrow balcony above the street, from which drifted the strangely delicious-smelling blue smoke from the tailpipes of lorries. He wasted a precious chunk of his funds on dinner at Maxim’s with one of his Helen-endorsed acquaintances. It was a deflating experience: mediocre food, and service that let him and his new friend understand they were nobodies. As if James needed to be reminded of that.
James preferred the food at his pension, where board was included. Every night brought a different cheap expression of cuisine bourgeoise, real-housewife dishes: boeuf bourguignon; pot-au-feu; thickly sauced blanquette de veau, which robed cheap bits of meat in glory; calf’s feet coated in the sauce called poulette, an emulsion rich with egg yolks and chicken broth, cooked down to concentrate the flavor. In another pension around the corner, where they let nonresidents buy single meals, he ate cold slices of a mosaic of pink-and-white ham cubes fixed in a mortar of parsleyed jelly, vibrant, fresh, and surprising. Each morning’s breakfast—hot chocolate with a spume of bubbles and madly buttery rolls, shattery outside, gently elastic and yeast-scented within—brandished richness yet seemed unfazed by excess. Every dish broke open a vista. Still, twenty-year-old James hadn’t come to Paris in search of cuisine.
His new English friends said they’d take him south of the city to Plessis-Robinson, a forested suburb where outdoor taverns were built into ancient chestnut trees, rustic vertical pavilions overlooking terraces with music for dancing—real French guinguettes, something out of Renoir. And when it got late, it was possible to wander off into the woods and have charming adventures with men.
One night they took the train south and climbed the narrow, uneven stairs to a treehouse platform in one of the taverns. They ate roast chicken, cold and dry and with rubbery skin, hoisted up in baskets, and drank bottle after bottle of wine. When they finally sauntered into the forest, they became separated in the dark. Eventually James found his way back to the station alone (no sign of the English boys) and took the early train back to Paris. He reached rue Jacob just as dawn was breaking. He stood on his tiny balcony smoking, listening as the sweeper scraped his shovel up the curb, babies in the houses began to cry, and the din of traffic rose with the sun.
Another night his friends took him to a queer brothel in Pigalle that looked like a bathhouse. In a locker room, they stripped and donned bathrobes. Then they sat on benches facing inward in the tiled main room, as gigolos wrapped in short towels, black satin masks concealing their faces, sauntered past, here and there pausing to flirt with a patron or talk into his ear. A few patrons opened their robes when they saw something they liked. If you fancied a private massage from one of the boys, you gave the bath attendant a few francs; he’d show you to a niche and pull the curtain closed. James tried to absorb every detail so he’d remember later: the whispers and laughter, moans and an occasional slap, a gigolo’s yawn.
Before he left France on September 7, 1923, sailing on the SS Paris from Le Havre to New York (a splurge, though he shared a cabin), James did have a brief affair. It was with a boxer—a prizefightairr, the man said in his husky accent. They met on the street and went to a hotel the man knew about. James paid for it.
And while his six weeks in Paris had given James his first taste of caviar with blinis, and of exquisite little mille-feuilles and éclairs, it was his prizefightairr who had given him his first truly astonishing, never-to-be-forgotten taste of possibility in a world he was only beginning to understand.
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WHEN HE ARRIVED in New York the first time, after the SS Paris docked at the Chelsea Piers in late September 1923, following his five and a half months abroad, James was eager to find his milieu in New York, but the manic city proved indifferent to him. London teemed, but order prevailed; shops and cafés had decorum. Parisians were uninhibited, once you breached their walls, yet polite in their own way. New York was an arena, where everyone constantly elbowed each other out, grasping for the smallest scrap of comfort, wealth, or advantage. On the subway, someone was always eager to seize your grip space if you took your hand away from the support pole for even a second.
James meant to stay as long as he could, possibly forever. He couldn’t face Portland. He’d persuaded Elizabeth to give him an allowance (enough for a furnished room in Chelsea with board—it wasn’t much) while he searched for auditions. He wandered the city he’d long imagined. He stood in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria, awed by its grandeur, the rich fabrics and the Victorian paintings; the ironwork and epic columns. He returned a week later to treat himself to lunch in the restaurant—he’d had a tooth pulled that morning and needed coddling. He ordered Waldorf salad: apples, celery, and walnuts in mayonnaise dressing. He’d seen the name so many times and supposed it must be wonderful in its birthplace. It was not; the apples were mealy, past season, and the dish was expensive: a simple thing gotten needlessly wrong.
He went to Times Square, to the old Astor Hotel and its bar, infamous as a rendezvous spot for men. On one side of the long bar, the sexes were mixed; the other side was the male realm. It was darker there and stifling, not chatty or cheeky like the subterranean queer hotel bars in London, but serious. James found he preferred the Astor’s actual beef to a bull on the hoof. He discovered he enjoyed dropping in on the hotel’s café before a matinee at a Midtown theater for the cold boiled-beef salad, while watching anxious gentlemen scuttle to the bar. When it came to sex or sourcing decent apples, New Yorkers had no patience.
The only real place in Manhattan where James found peace and a sense of recognition was Greenwich Village. Once he left the clattering, soot-caked Sixth Avenue El behind, the city opened to the western sky, the clouds bobbing above the Hudson like chipped, weightless meringues. The metropolis reoriented here. The buildings were on a more human scale, and the streets veered charmingly off-kilter. It seemed sequestered. It felt safe.
James finally got his casting break, from the actor-impresario Walter Hampden. The previous fall, his repertory company had mounted a production of Cyrano de Bergerac at the National Theater. Hampden was taking it on the road for the 1924 fall season, and word was he was seeking actors of all sizes to populate his spectacle. James wrote to Hampden, describing himself as large but not colossal. He auditioned and landed a nonspeaking role in the chorus.
Logistics for the seven-week tour were mad: an eight-car train—one just to transport the pair of horses appearing in the show, three sleeping cars, a day coach for the actors, and three baggage cars—eighty-one cast members, thirty-seven crew and mechanics, wailing child actors and stage mothers. The road production of Cyrano opened in St. Louis in October 1924, and the train rolled on to Cincinnati, Boston, and Philadelphia. The show closed at Brooklyn’s Majestic Theatre on December 1.
It was the highest-profile engagement of James’s stuttering career. And yet what stuck with him was the daily ritual of the show’s female lead, the London-born Jeanette Sherwin Jolley, who played Roxanne. She drank bootleg liquor ceaselessly, scurrying from the train wherever it made a morning stop, and into a restaurant or hotel dining room, demanding in Lady Macbeth tones a large soup plate of cold, canned tomatoes: balm for her hangovers.
In every actor was a deep well of need, a brokenness that vanished when they were playing a part. James was a silent extra whose only value in the theater was as a body that stood out even from the cheap seats. What part was he playing? When the tour wrapped, he booked a sleeper on the train home to Portland, a one-way ticket back to Salmon Street.
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IN THE SPRING OF 1925, James took a job in the interior decorating department of Portland’s stiff and bourgeois Meier & Frank store. He returned to local dramatics, as a player in several productions in the city’s booming Little Theatre Movement. They called it the Broadway of Portland.
Bess Whitcomb, a producer and director, liked James and took him on. He found an acting mentor in Whitcomb, and, because she was a lesbian, a sense of recognition. That fall, James quit the department store after landing work as a drama teacher at a private girls’ school, Gabel Country Day in Southwest Portland, where he organized a Christmas pageant. To the girls, James was a star.
He got announcer gigs on local radio. In the fall of 1926, James landed a plum stage role, Father Hyacinth in The Swan, by the Hungarian Ferenc Molnár, in a production by the new Portland Art Players. James played a grizzled monk who served up a stew of comedic and melodramatic lines to the young romantic leads. Anyway, he looked right in the robe.
Prohibition, begun in 1920, still reigned. On occasional Sundays, James got together with female friends to make bathtub gin and drink themselves stupid. It took all day: mixing alcohol, distilled water, and aromatics in a friend’s bathtub, as her mother hovered nervously on the other side of the closed door. They transferred the searing liquor to a wooden cask and rolled it around the bathroom floor to help it “age.” As night fell, it was ready to fuel a sloppy party, with shrieking and dancing to orchestra music blasting from the radio.
One day, James’s father gave him a large package wrapped in paper. It contained dozens of flat cans of contraband Russian vodka, smuggled in on a ship from China. “Drink this instead of bootleg whiskey,” John told him. It was James’s first taste of the spirit: a revelation.
James made another discovery that winter. He learned that for several years—since James was a small boy, at least—his father had kept a mistress, and that together they’d had a child. Essentially, John had a parallel family. It explained his absences, his distance. Elizabeth knew about it. They had long ago erected an iron partition between their lives.
In a way, it made James appreciate his mother more. James had little affection for Elizabeth, but he admired the rational arrangement she’d forged with John, one they’d kept for so many years. After this, James thought of his father in a different way. He felt sorry for him, for marrying a woman who actively hated him. As the reality of it settled in, John’s other family made sense to James. He hoped his father was happy in his shadow home away from Salmon Street.
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JAMES THOUGHT OF BREAKING into pictures. In 1926, he found a cheap room in Hollywood, in a house where he met another aspiring actor, Paul Claude Fielding. Born in India, Paul had a nice face and a proper English public-school accent. They drove to Tijuana together in Paul’s car and had a picnic on cold chicken fried in olive oil. Paul got a small part in a Rex Ingram picture, The Garden of Allah. And while James was neither as handsome nor as lucky as Paul, he did land a place as an extra in a crowd, a Roman soldier in the crucifixion scene of Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings.
James got a nod to costume up for another crowd scene in 1927, for Erich von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly, starring Gloria Swanson. Since the picture was never released in the United States—only in Europe and South America—James was doubly invisible. Hollywood was a daily crush of hopeful extras in studio casting lots, eating wax paper–wrapped sandwiches they’d stuffed in jacket pockets and playing cards to cope with boredom.
In 1931, James moved to Seattle to audit classes in the University of Washington’s theater department. After a semester, he was accepted to Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute of Technology (the future Carnegie Mellon University), where he took classes in costume and set design and became friends with John Ashby Conway, a young instructor of theater design visiting from the University of Washington. Late one night after a party, as they stumbled home along Pittsburgh’s frigid Fifth Avenue, both men opened their coats to flash anyone unlucky enough to be shuttling past.
After the first semester, James—still restless—returned to Portland and Salmon Street in January 1931. He acted in local theater and cooked for dinner parties at friends’ houses. His fellow actor Agnes Crowther, an interior decorator just starting out, persuaded some of her clients to hire James to teach them how to cook a few simple dishes in their newly done-up kitchens.
By 1932, James was directing a small repertory theater company that performed plays—one-night engagements, usually—in towns throughout northwest Oregon. In Salem, they had their biggest opportunity yet: two performances of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline for residents of the state capital. James had played the lead role the previous year in Seattle, in a traveling production with Portland’s Dufwin Players. Now, James was directing and starring. For days before the one performance, the Salem paper was buzzing: Professional actors from Portland promised to put on a first-rate show.
But the reviews next morning were no better than lukewarm. Critics praised the female lead, Genevieve Thayer. Everything else about opening night, however, had seemed outdated and stagey. James read the review at Genevieve’s parents’ house in Salem, where everyone in the repertory company was bunking for the week, sleeping in pinned-together blankets on Mrs. Thayer’s parlor carpet. James was pushing thirty. Salem seemed far from the fabulous life in the theater he’d imagined for himself.
What was it James hadn’t liked about New York City? He struggled to recall. Maybe if he worked for a couple of years more and put some money aside, he’d have enough to give Manhattan a second shot—even working at a department store there would be better than languishing here among the provincials.
If one had to accept being a nobody, one might at least try to have some fun.