I wrote Rubyfruit in 1971. Daughters published it in 1973 and Bantam reprinted it in 1977. Soon after the Bantam deal I found a very young Wendy Weil to be my literary agent. She worked for a well-established agent, Julian Bach, in those days.
Belonging to a kicked-around group means enduring unpleasant events, whether it’s having an ugly word flung at you, being denied a job or housing or being cast aside even from social discourse. I experience such unpleasantries. Perhaps you have as well. Irritating, painful and sometimes dangerous as being an outsider can be, poverty is worse.
My life changed the day I finally had money.
The several years following 1972 weren’t entirely uneventful, but hustling for funds, working and trying to write often drained the days of their luster.
A few memories remain, such as studying in Princeton’s library. A friend in the archeology department got me a library card. I’d moved to a small farm in Cranbury, New Jersey, to be close to Princeton. The campus, beautiful and serene, allowed me the luxury of enjoying it without having to go to classes. I proofread novels at night for money. No one cared if a proofreader was gay.
The chapel at Princeton was my second refuge. The stained-glass windows are exceptionally fine for a small church.
In spring the wisteria with pendulous lavender blossoms drapes over the stone buildings. Aaron Burr’s father was president of what was then named the College of New Jersey. Burr himself attended, as did James Madison. Since I respect James Madison, I paid attention to Princeton. The past is never dead for me; it rides on my shoulder like a becapped and jeweled monkey.
I felt alive again being on a farm, although a farm in New Jersey is different than Hanover Shoe Farm—smaller, different crops. Folks down the road had horses. That’s what really mattered.
Baby Jesus loved it. She’d sit under the purple morning glories covering the tractor shed.
Once my research was over and I’d finished In Her Day, I had an opportunity to teach a semester at Goddard College, in Plainfield, Vermont.
Goddard was as close to an experimental college as one could get. The faculty was interesting, many of them genuine academics but willing to try new things. Rubyfruit attracted them. Probably it was the only college in America that would have taken a chance on me.
I loved teaching. I know writers are supposed to hate it, but watching another person handle the language delights me. They all come to writing classes in college worried about character development and plot; some are already thinking about an agent. The cart’s before the horse. They know nothing about their tool, English. You’ve got to crawl before you can walk, so I took them right back to nouns and verbs, active voice versus passive—as a writer sees language, not a grammarian. A writer doesn’t need to know the subject of an elliptical clause. It’s nice but not necessary. What is necessary is to hear it. Language is music, and few languages are capable of such wide cadence as our own.
As I knocked around from pillar to post, from Plainfield, Vermont, to New York City, to Cazenovia, New York, I learned to rise at five or five-thirty in the morning, write until I had to go to work and then come home and write until I fell asleep.
People make demands on you. Not being a social person helped me write. Over the years I’ve disappointed many people by not attending parties or dinners. I hate those affairs. If an event doesn’t involve work, theater, horses or hounds, I don’t want to go. Because I wasn’t social I made few friends. It’s no different today. I’d sooner bleed from the throat than go to most cocktail parties, and fund-raisers are a descent into hell.
I’ll do it if I have to or if I’m the point person raising the funds.
What I do love is having tea with a friend. Because I want to know what people think and feel, I like intimate gatherings. Teatime is my favorite time of day, the best time to see people. Also, since I don’t drink, having tea spares me the ordeal of dinner, where you run the risk of your dinner partner or partners bending their elbow and becoming increasingly less witty. A few people become more witty with alcohol—precious few.
What strikes me most about those floating years between the first publication of Rubyfruit and the release by Bantam is that they had little emotional effect on me.
Even a year’s stint in Boston, an exquisite architectural jewel, left hardly a mark. The one thing I most remember from my time in Boston was the corruption of Elaine Noble, the first openly gay elected person. She did business with crooked folks and turned state’s witness to escape any charges that might be brought against her. What sorrow she brought on herself, and what sorrow she brought on all those who elected her.
Boston brought me Santa Ferari, Ann Lewis, and Ann’s brother, Representative Barney Frank, each of whom I see intermittently, usually at one of those fund-raisers I don’t much like. While Ann, then deputy director of Clinton’s re-election campaign, and Barney are acquaintances whose political acumen is never to be underestimated, Santa had become a friend. She raises funds for a house where women with AIDS can live.
Our friendship had an unlikely beginning; we both dated the same woman, the above-mentioned Elaine Noble, called by us and others “Ignoble.”
Before Elaine took her waltz with the sleazy boys, she worked hard. Full of energy and that bombast so peculiar to professional politicians, she helped me buy two buildings on Marlborough Street near Massachusetts Avenue. In the early seventies they were cheap. Broke as I was, Linda Damico—a saint, really—lent me five thousand dollars for a down payment. I met Linda at a summer school for feminists called Sagaris. I’d helped found it but didn’t administer it. She was one of the students, a quiet, thoughtful person, a true thinking person.
These two buildings brought me $225,000 worth of debt. Finally I was in business. You’re nothing in America if you don’t have debt. All those years that I paid cash, had no credit cards, was clean as a whistle, were utterly worthless in our perverted economy. Now I had a shitload of debt, and all of a sudden the banks loved me.
Elaine Noble helped me find the buildings, she put me in touch with John and Linda Lecoq, the owners, and she took a share of the properties. Years later I sold those two buildings as the co-op boom was starting. I did okay.
While my romance with Elaine was short-lived, I wasn’t upset. I rarely was, because I neither understood romantic love nor wished to understand it. It looked like neurosis shared by two. So when the bloom was off the rose I was fine. This relaxed attitude was not always shared by the other party.
Elaine, however, could not have cared less. She was wrapped up in what appeared to be the beginning of a good career and was meeting lots of women who were falling all over her. My southern worldview, with its emphasis on honor in capital letters and underlined three times, wearied her.
Santa, with her green eyes, rapier wit and good looks, caught her eye. Well, to tell the truth, Santa caught everyone’s eye. Elaine was happy that I didn’t throw roadblocks up as she drove in the direction of the appealing, alluring and available Santa.
Poor Santa. She was the one who bore the brunt when Elaine’s dealings became public. All the more painful since Santa had given her ample warning that if she continued doing business with the wrong people her career would flame out.
Elaine’s apartment was on the ground floor of 401 Marlborough Street, and mine was on the floor above it, in the rear. We had keys to each other’s apartments, but this turned out to be more useful for her than for me. Since she was out all the time, I endlessly walked her Welsh Terrier, a dog with an inexhaustible voice.
One evening I came downstairs and she was sitting with a state senator who had a reputation for financially advantageous deals allied to political favors. When he left I said, “Elaine, you’d better be careful. You’re running with the wrong people.”
Flushed, she replied, “You’ll never get anywhere in politics. You need a little shit to fertilize the rose.”
I told her if she cut a deal with this particular politician she’d better move out of the building. She moved next door, and soon after moved in with Santa.
But the damage was done. It took a year for the fertilizer to become public knowledge.
Elaine was the second person to tell me I’d never make it in politics. The first was Robin Morgan, who said, “You don’t know how to dissemble.”
The terrible thing is, they’re right. In order to succeed, you have to lie.
If I didn’t lie about being gay at a time when you could be shot for it, worst case, or ostracized, more common response, why would I lie about anything else?
That doesn’t mean I don’t forget things or repress others or plain make mistakes. If you have total recall, I feel sorry for you. Repression is like nicotine—it soothes in small doses. Also, if you have total recall you will be bereft of friends. No one likes to be reminded of exactly what they did at Old U at that wild fraternity party.
If my mind is clear, I will not lie. I guess I won’t be your president or even your senator or state senator.
From Boston I moved to Cazenovia, New York, where I taught for a year at the Women’s Writers’ Center, housed in Cazenovia College.
Cazenovia, twenty miles east of Syracuse, glistens with white clapboard houses, stone houses, big houses on the lake. It’s gorgeous. The upstate New Yorkers are like New Englanders, taciturn, distant, wary. Once they decide they like you they are friendly. It’s the reverse of the South, where everyone is warm on the surface. No wonder Yankees get so confused. They think we’re fakes because we’re so welcoming while they associate that warmth with family or years of friendship. Our rules are different, that’s all. Underneath we take just as long to size someone up, but we don’t feel the need to stick people out in the cold while we are making up our minds.
Another huge difference is that a southerner hates to say no. We have evolved elaborate ways to refuse things or offer criticism without saying no or being unduly harsh—in public. At home and with your best friends you can be scalding. Yankees feel as though they’ve fallen into a vat of marshmallow because they’re curt with one another and feel no need to smooth things over. It’s a generalization but more often true than not. It’s an odd Yankee who does the two-step of refusal without seeming to say no.
Here I was amidst the infidels, the people who had carried off the family silver. I looked for our pattern but didn’t find it.
A local realtor, dead now, complained to the president of Cazenovia that I was teaching lesbianism. The president gave her a copy of my course list, which included lots of Euripides, and told her she was off the mark.
The funny thing was, I’d never met my defender. For him it was a matter of principle even though I was employed not by Cazenovia College, but by the Women’s Writers’ Center.
This was the first time a straight man had stood up for me.
The second wonderful thing was the Genesee Valley Hunt. I could see the hunt off. They go early up there because of the cold. They start cubbing in August, and hunting is over by Christmas.
Upstate New York has good horses, all breeds. The state legislature has passed legislation to make the state hospitable to horsemen. Consequently, there are large breeding operations, especially for Thoroughbreds and Standardbreds.
There’s polo at Skaneateles and driving everywhere. The estate, Lorenzo, at the west side of Cazenovia Lake, hosted a driving competition while I lived there.
Another wonderful thing was that Mom visited me. She had visited me once before, in Boston, but it took less effort to get her to Cazenovia in June when the weather was perfect, the nights crisp and the days warm.
Mother and I walked everywhere. We gardened. We rode out to stables looking at horses. We ate her fried chicken and greens, drank vats of ice-cold Coca-Cola and found that we could be good friends.
One evening we walked along the two gardens that ran the length of the yard, which had to be about a quarter of an acre. A lovely apple tree graced one of the gardens, a small ruins by the canal, the other. We heard a sorry mewing and found a long-haired calico, a half-grown kitten, under the apple tree. Undernourished, full of fleas, she was not an impressive sight. We raced her to the vet, cleaned her up and introduced her to Baby Jesus and her sidekick, Frip, a big black and white cat who had joined the family, too.
Cazenovia, as Mom named the cat, grew into an animal of such beauty people would stop and stare at her when they first visited me.
I hated to put Mom back on the plane to Florida. It was the first time I realized how much I loved her.
She may not have been the best mother. She was certainly a strict disciplinarian, and her remarks cut to the bone, but she was the only mother I knew. Her visit to Cazenovia brought out a softer side. Maybe I’d matured enough to let her be and maybe she’d matured enough to stop giving orders.
I sat down and wrote Six of One, a novel about Mother and Aunt Mimi starting when they were children. I cleaned it up to get it published!
Anyone can write one book. Almost anyone. Fewer people can write a novel, as fiction is difficult. The true test is writing the second and then the third work of fiction. By the time you fire off that third one, you’re either a writer or you’re not. If you don’t know it, everyone around you does. A fiction writer lives or dies on the page.
Six of One lifted me up and over. I was the real deal.
And with the royalties from Rubyfruit, I could sit down and think about what I wanted to do next.
I didn’t have to think long. Marion Rosenberg, who once worked for Elliot Kastner, the producer, invited me to Los Angeles to sniff around the film business.
The five preceding years hadn’t changed me inside. It took Hollywood to do that.