Never pass up the opportunity to have sex or appear on television.
—Gore Vidal
Mass media strongly influenced how people responded to these books and plays, and the mass media was changing. The weekly newsmagazines, Time and Newsweek, were major powers in American culture in 1960. It’s funny now to read John Cheever’s letters and find him worrying about his reviews in Time. The New Yorker was losing its reputation for blandness and taking more risks, especially in its nonfiction. There were new weekly newspapers, too, such as the Village Voice, which first published in 1955. There were even a few gay magazines.
ONE began in Los Angeles in 1953 (its all-caps name is from a quote by Thomas Carlyle: “A mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men ONE”) and was more interested in legal and political matters than in the arts. The typical article had a title like “New Deal for Deviants” or “Successful Homosexuals.” However, the magazine ran Norman Mailer’s surprisingly forward essay, “The Homosexual Villain,” and, in the 1960s, began to review novels. The Mattachine Review, a publication of the first national gay rights organization, the Mattachine Society, was founded in 1955 and occasionally printed poems, such as “The Green Automobile” by Allen Ginsberg, but was even less interested in cultural matters than ONE. They ran an occasional piece about Plato or Whitman, but nothing about Albee, Williams, or camp. The publishing schedule was erratic and subscribers were few. In the Sixties ONE sold roughly 2,300 copies per issue. The vast majority of gay readers continued to hear about gay books and plays through mainstream publications. ONE’s most important achievement was to work its way through the court system as an “obscene publication” until the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the lower courts and freed the magazine to be sent through the mail. (The high court didn’t hear the case but made their decision based entirely on Roth v. United States, the same case cited in the trial of Howl.)
Surprisingly, the most important change in media for gay people happened not in print but on television. Dramas and sitcoms remained closed to homosexuals—as they were to blacks until halfway through the decade. No, the venue where gay figures could shine was the late night talk show.
The 1960s was a golden age of the public intellectual; almost all of the major literary figures appeared on TV. It was a golden age of pretension, when people wanted to appear smarter than they were, unlike our current age when even politicians strive to seem average. But a pretense to intellect can often produce real intelligence. Time and Newsweek competed with each other in putting major writers on their covers. The New Yorker’s standing as a status symbol enabled it to run long, serious, book-length pieces without losing readers. An actual book publisher, Bennett Cerf of Random House, was a regular on a TV game show, What’s My Line? And late night talk show hosts from David Susskind and Jack Paar to David Frost and Dick Cavett enjoyed bringing important authors on their shows.
A few of these writers were gay. They couldn’t talk about it on the air, of course, but some didn’t need to say it in words.
Truman Capote came to television relatively late in his career. He was beaten to it by Gore Vidal, who first went on TV in 1957 to publicize Visit to a Small Planet on Broadway. Vidal’s handsome looks and smooth, patrician voice worked well in the cool medium. He seemed so respectable that he could get away with saying disrespectful things. He became a regular on Jack Paar’s The Tonight Show and sometimes appeared on the Today show with Dave Garroway and J. Fred Muggs, a chimpanzee.
Capote had no television experience when he was invited to be on David Susskind’s show, Open End, in January 1959. Breakfast at Tiffany’s had been published two months earlier and he was there to promote it. He was between projects, a vulnerable time for any writer, but it’s safe to assume that part of him was thinking: If Gore can do this, so can I.
He worried aloud on the ride to the TV studio in Newark in a limo shared with Norman Mailer and Mailer’s wife, Adele. He insisted he was there only because his publisher, Bennett Cerf, thought TV was the future of books.
Norman Mailer wrote about the evening in a long, strange, brilliant essay, “Of a Small and Modest Malignancy.” (The title refers not to Capote but to television.) For all his macho windbagging, Mailer could be oddly likable, self-deprecatory as well as self-pitying, generous as well as competitive. He was fascinated by gay men and not afraid to speak his mind, for good and ill.
The Mailers and Capote arrived at the studio and joined Susskind and his third guest, Dorothy Parker. The writers sat down, the show began—it was broadcast live—and Mailer immediately took over, holding forth on politics. After an hour of monopolizing conversation, he sensed Susskind turning against him, so he shut up, wanting to punish Susskind, thinking the show would die without him. He let Capote talk.
The subject of the Beats came up. Mailer had mixed feelings about Jack Kerouac, but Capote despised his work. “It is not writing. It is only typing,” Capote said. Dorothy Parker agreed.
The show ended. On their way out they stopped to look at the kinescope playback. Parker hated seeing herself and hurried off, but Mailer and Capote lingered to watch. Capote thought Mailer looked great, but that he looked terrible.
They returned to Manhattan for drinks and dinner at El Morocco, where Capote knew all the waiters. Mailer and his wife assured him that he had been fine.
The next morning Mailer’s friends began to call to say how much they’d enjoyed the show, especially for Capote. They kept quoting his line, “It’s not writing; it’s only typing.” Some went so far as to say that Capote had walked all over Mailer, but even those who complimented Mailer wanted to hear more about the other writer. Capote himself called Mailer that afternoon and said he was surprised by all the praise he was getting.
Furious about being upstaged, and baffled, Mailer returned to the TV studio a few days later and asked to see the kinescope. He discovered that Capote had gotten far more close-ups than he had; he felt the show had been tilted against him. (He never acknowledges that his endless monologue may have put off viewers.) But he also saw that Capote had earned those close-ups:
Capote did not look small on the show but large! His face, in fact, was extraordinary, that young-old face, still pretty and with such promise of oncoming ugliness; that voice, so full of snide rustlings and unforgiving nasalities; it was a voice to knock New York on its ear. The voice had survived; it spoke of horrors seen and passed over; it told of judgments that would be merciless.
Where other people heard only a freak or a fag, Mailer heard the mystic androgyny of a new Tiresias. It’s a generous, imaginative leap, and it captures the appeal of Capote’s otherness. The next time Mailer encountered Capote in person, he found him changed, with “a new assurance to put on top of the old one.”
Many Middle Americans in years to come would roll their eyes and sigh whenever the little man with the androgynous voice appeared on TV. But others—men and women, gay and straight—would be transfixed. Capote discovered that the fame of writing books, even best sellers, was nothing compared to the fame of appearing regularly on television.
He finally began work on a new project, a New Yorker piece about life in Moscow like a follow-up to The Muses Are Heard. But it wasn’t clicking. He spent his time instead with his “swans,” rich lady friends like Babe Paley and Slim Keith. Then, on the morning of November 16, 1959, he read a short piece in the inside pages of the New York Times about a brutal murder in Kansas. A family of four, the Clutters, had been bound, gagged, and shot in an isolated farmhouse; nobody knew who did it. Capote asked William Shawn, his editor at the New Yorker, if he could drop the Moscow project to explore the Kansas story. Shawn said yes. Originally it was to be the portrait of small-town America stunned by modern violence, a mood piece with an unsolved mystery at the center. But while Capote was in Garden City, Kansas, interviewing neighbors with the help of his childhood friend, Harper Lee, a pair of ex-cons were arrested and charged with the murders. Capote recognized he had a full-scale book on his hands.
He spent the first two weeks of January 1960 visiting the jail and talking with the accused, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. He then went back to New York and didn’t return until the trial in March. It’s startling to realize how quickly everything happened during the first stage of the story. The trial lasted only a week. Smith and Hickock were convicted and sentenced to be hanged on May 13. Capote immediately left for New York to write his book. He found he couldn’t work in the city so he took his boxes of notes and crossed the ocean to Spain with Jack Dunphy and isolated himself in a fishing village on the Mediterranean.
Only then, when Capote was living with Smith and Hickock on a daily basis in his imagination, did he become truly intimate with the two men, especially Smith. Smith was shorter and more soulful than Hickock—more like Capote, in fact, easier to identify with. A written man is more porous and accessible than a live one. Capote was not allowed to correspond with Smith and Hickock—that would come later—but he wrote constantly to Alvin Dewey of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, checking on details and clarifying points and learning new developments. He was relieved when the Kansas Supreme Court issued a stay of execution to hear an appeal for a new trial.
He worked slowly and steadily on the book, writing it out in pencil on yellow legal pads, re-creating scenes, building up portraits of the murdered family, the townspeople, the police, and the killers. It was an epic with a huge cast of characters. Capote decided that a true-crime story could be as well-written as a fine novel. He took enormous pains with the prose, and it shows.
The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.”… The land is flat and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.
In Cold Blood has had many imitators, but it remains fresh and powerful decades later. Nobody has matched its lean, elegant prose, its emotional richness, or its solid architecture. Capote made two brilliant technical decisions early on. First, in the opening pages, he built up to the murder, cross-cutting between the Clutters and the killers; then he jumped over the killing and left it blank until after the arrest, when Smith and Hickock confess to the police. Second, he left himself entirely out of the story. He was not just an onlooker, as he was in The Muses Are Heard or Breakfast at Tiffany’s; he was completely invisible. Yet his presence haunts the book, like the Invisible Man whose faint outline appears only in the rain. (His secret presence is so tantalizing that, forty years later, two different movies—Capote and Infamous—retold the story simply by editing Capote back into his book.)
It took Capote a little over three years to write In Cold Blood—everything except the ending. He and Dunphy stayed in Europe almost the entire time. Through lawyers and Dewey, he heard about the appeals and stays of execution that kept Smith and Hickock alive on Death Row. Not until he returned to the States in June 1963 did Capote get permission to write to the convicted killers. Suddenly two men who had become characters in his imagination were sending him letters. He visited them in prison and mailed them books: Thoreau and dictionaries and his own work for Smith, Harold Robbins novels and girlie magazines for Hickock. He impatiently waited for the court system to decide what would happen so he could write his final pages. His letters to Smith and Hickock are full of grave concern for their future while those to other people express frustration over the delays. I assume that both sets of feelings were perfectly sincere.
Finally the last appeal was denied; the execution was set for April 14, 1965. Capote flew out to Kansas with his Random House editor, Joe Fox. At the motel he changed his mind and decided he didn’t want to see the men. He told Smith over the phone that the officials wouldn’t let him visit. Then at the last minute he changed his mind again and drove out to the prison with Fox, arriving in time to exchange a few last words with Smith and Hickock. Fox remained outside while Capote joined twenty other men, including Detective Dewey, in the warehouse with the gallows.
First Dick Hickock was hanged, then, a half hour later, Perry Smith. In In Cold Blood, Capote never mentioned his own presence in the warehouse but described the death of Smith entirely from Dewey’s point of view:
Steps, noose, mask; but before the mask was adjusted, the prisoner spat out his chewing gum into the chaplain’s outstretched palm. Dewey shut his eyes; he kept them shut until he heard the thud-snap that announces a rope-broken neck…. He remembered his first meeting with Perry in the interrogation room at the Police Headquarters in Las Vegas—the dwarfish boy-man seated in the metal chair, his small booted feet not quite brushing the floor. And when Dewey now opened his eyes, that is what he saw: the same childish feet, tilted, dangling.
A few hours later, Capote flew back to New York with Fox, clutching his editor’s hand and crying for the entire flight.
He finished writing the final pages by the middle of June. In Cold Blood was published in four installments in four consecutive issues of the New Yorker at the end of 1965. It came out as a book in January 1966, dedicated to Jack Dunphy and Harper Lee. It was praised to the skies. Capote claimed to have invented a new genre, the “nonfiction novel,” which the smarter critics knew not to believe, but it didn’t matter. The book sold like no literary book had sold before. It was on the New York Times best-seller list for thirty-seven weeks, twelve weeks as number one. The author was on magazine covers, TV talk shows, and the radio. NBC News filmed a half-hour special, Capote Returns to Kansas, that April. He had left himself out of his book, but he seemed to be everywhere else, the effeminate little man who wrote a best seller about two hardened killers.
The book appeared the same month as the Time magazine essay about homosexuality and Stanley Kauffmann’s attack on gays in the theater. One would expect this antigay mood to splash Capote. Kauffmann, in fact, reviewed In Cold Blood in the New Republic, giving the book one of its few bad notices. This time, he did his name-calling in code: “Are we so bankrupt, so avid for novelty that merely because a famous writer produces an amplified magazine crime-feature, the result is automatically elevated to serious literature just as Andy Warhol, by painting a soup-carton, has allegedly elevated it to art?” Many people knew about Andy Warhol. But strangely enough, nobody else called Capote on his sexuality, not in code or otherwise. The homosexual panic in the lively arts did not affect the reception of In Cold Blood. It was as if books existed in an entirely different dimension. Maybe book reviewers were too polite to mention it. Or perhaps In Cold Blood was too straight for Middle America to read homosexuality into it. They never suspected that gay men know more about the rough trade world of Smith and Hickock than most family men do. There is a gay story line in In Cold Blood, but it remained hidden until those two movies were made.
One other bad review stung Capote deeply. Kenneth Tynan in the Observer in Britain accused him of letting Smith and Hickock die in order to give his book a stronger ending: “For the first time an influential writer in the front rank has been placed in a privileged intimacy with criminals about to die and, in my view, done less than he might have to save them…. No piece of prose, however deathless, is worth a human life.” It’s an accusation that persists to this day. But the appeals process went on for five long years. The case was heard in many courts and presented by different teams of experienced lawyers. It’s hard to know what Capote could have done that wasn’t done already. Yet the charge stuck in his craw for years to come.
Making the charge more damning is the belief that Capote was in love with Smith: he let his beloved die for the sake of a best seller, and then paid for it for the rest of his life. Well, it makes a great story. But one does not need to fall in love with a man to become emotionally connected with him. Donald Windham makes some wise comments about Capote’s friendship with Smith and Hickock: “For although the word ‘friends’ should be put into quotation marks, he had become closely involved with the two criminals, especially Perry Smith, as closely involved as a soldier with two prisoners trapped in a no-man’s-land in a battle might be, on opposite sides but inexorably bound together.” In his book Capote identifies as much with the victims as he does with the killers, and it creates a powerful tension for the reader. I assume a similar tension existed in the author, an intense knot of fear, righteousness, pity, and survivor’s guilt. No wonder Capote’s drinking grew worse and new nervous tics appeared while he waited for the execution.
Afterward he insisted his conscience was clear and claimed he had done all that he could for Smith and Hickock. And he threw himself a party.
He rented the grand ballroom at the Plaza Hotel for a masked ball to be held on November 28, 1966, ostensibly in honor of his friend, Katherine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post. He invited every famous person he had met or wanted to meet. He even invited a few unknown friends, including Alvin and Marie Dewey. (Jack Dunphy was invited, of course, and he actually attended, much to everyone’s surprise. He and Capote were still a couple, but Dunphy grew more withdrawn as he grew older, avoiding Capote’s society friends, which meant seeing less of Capote. Capote bought them two “his and his” cottages in the Hamptons, then spent more time at Dunphy’s than his own because Dunphy’s place was homier and Dunphy was usually home. They were a curious couple.)
George Plimpton provides a wonderful account of the Black and White Ball in his oral biography, Truman Capote, by letting two dozen participants share their conflicting stories. Some describe it as an overblown prom for grown-ups. Others imbue it with the magic of a grand ball in Proust. Jerome Robbins danced with Lauren Bacall. Harold Prince and his wife left after a half hour. Norman Mailer got into an argument with McGeorge Bundy from the White House about Vietnam. Knowing what had been and what would be for Capote, one can’t help but think of the party as an elaborate defense mechanism against guilt and unease. Yet for twelve hours, from ten at night to ten the next morning, famous names in tuxedos, evening gowns, and masks poured in and out of the bright hotel overlooking Central Park, and success looked very much like what a small, precocious boy in Alabama might imagine it to be.
Fifteen blocks downtown from the Plaza Hotel, a black jazz musician named Rufus Scott leaves a shabby Forty-second Street movie theater around midnight. Heartbroken and broke, crazy with guilt, he roams Times Square in the bitter cold.
A hotel’s enormous neon name challenged the starless sky. So did the names of movie stars and people currently appearing or scheduled to appear on Broadway, along with the mile-high names of the vehicles which would carry them into immortality. The great buildings, unlit, blunt like the phallus or sharp like the spear, guarded the city which never slept.
Beneath them Rufus walked, one of the fallen—for the weight of this city was murderous—one of those who had been crushed on the day, which was every day, these towers fell. Entirely alone and dying of it, he was part of an unprecedented multitude.
We have stepped from fact to fiction, to the opening chapter of Another Country by James Baldwin, published four years earlier, in 1962. The novel’s first eighty pages are extraordinary, a powerful flow of city scenes and flashbacks that carry Rufus through his last night on earth to his suicide leap off the George Washington Bridge. According to received opinion, the book falls apart afterward, but it isn’t true. There are things wrong with Another Country, but, as Randall Jarrell said in italics of the faults in a Walt Whitman poem, “they do not matter.”
Baldwin began work on the novel before the publication of Giovanni’s Room in 1956. The country of the title is love. But where Giovanni’s Room is about the fear and defeat of love, the new novel is about love’s triumph, which is much harder to write about. Adding to the challenge, he included race this time. His characters strive to cross the great divide between whites and blacks in uneasy friendships and heated love affairs. Complicating matters further, Baldwin put in gay men who sleep with women and straight men who sleep with men.
Rufus, a young drummer, becomes involved with a circle of white artists in Greenwich Village; he is loved by both men and women. Scalded and scarred by racism, his paranoia turns his love of Leona, a white girl from the South, into something poisonous and ugly. Leona ends up in a mental hospital, which leads to Rufus’s nervous breakdown. After his suicide, Rufus’s younger sister, Ida, joins the circle of white friends. A rising blues singer, Ida is ambitious, angry, and unpredictable. The white friends fall in love with her just as they did with her brother. Then Eric, a gay actor from Alabama, returns from Paris, where he has fallen in love with a French street boy named Yves. While waiting for Yves to join him in New York, he begins an affair with Cass, the wife of a successful novelist.
There is an element of soap opera in this crisscross of plots, but soap opera has its own emotional truth. One wishes more soaps had some of the dangerous power that Baldwin achieves here. He covers a remarkable range of life, from nights in New York jazz clubs to a gay white childhood in the South to a pot party on a Greenwich Village rooftop to violent marital quarrels to a straight man and a gay man talking about their lovers—and then having sex with each other just to clear the air. This novel about pain and forgiveness is scored to multiple recordings of Bessie Smith.
It was a complex project that needed peace and concentration, but Baldwin’s life was anything but peaceful. He divided his time between Paris and New York, taking an apartment at 81 Horatio Street in Greenwich Village. He remained friendly with Lucien Happersberger (there’s a lot of Happersberger in the character of Yves), but he had a new friend in his life, a Turkish actor named Engin Cezzar. Cezzar studied at Yale Drama School, and they met when Cezzar was cast as Giovanni in an Actors Studio production of Giovanni’s Room. In effect, Baldwin was bonding with one of his characters. Cezzar later wrote in a memoir that he saved Baldwin from his “incessant homosexuality” by showing him the value of pure masculine friendship. Cezzar soon married, and Baldwin became good friends with his wife. In an odd essay about André Gide written at this time, “The Male Prison,” Baldwin complains about “the phenomena of present-day homosexuality… where it is impossible to have a lover or friend, where the possibility of genuine human involvement has altogether ceased.” He admires Gide for staying married, as if a double life gives a man the stability he could never find in gay life. Baldwin’s feelings about gay love were more conflicted than one might imagine from his fiction. Whatever the truth about his feelings for Cezzar, he visited him in Turkey and began to use Istanbul as a second home, in much the same way he had used Paris.
His personal life was placid compared to what was happening in the United States. The political climate was changing radically, and Baldwin’s career changed with it. The paperback of Notes of a Native Son had begun to sell with the success of Giovanni’s Room in 1956, but it fully took off with the rise of the civil rights movement. White readers wanted to understand the world of race, and Baldwin wrote about it clearly and passionately. Esquire and Harper’s commissioned articles from him. His next book of essays, Nobody Knows My Name, appeared to high praise in 1961 and was a best seller. Baldwin became involved in the movement himself, speaking at rallies and conferences and appearing on television—people found his clarinet-toned voice and beautifully odd face as fascinating as they found the voice and face of Truman Capote. It’s a wonder he was able to finish his novel at all, which he managed to do in Istanbul.
He was invited to a dinner at the White House honoring Nobel Prize winners in April 1962. He was delighted to meet Jackie Kennedy, but spent more time with Katherine Anne Porter.
Another Country was published that June. People who admired the essayist of race were startled to be reminded that he was also a novelist who wrote about gay sex. The novel received a contradictory mix of reviews, ranging from praise by Lionel Trilling to being called pornography by Stanley Edgar Hyman to being dismissed in the Times Book Review by Paul Goodman, who called the book “mediocre” but didn’t bother to describe the plot or name any characters. (Goodman was famously bisexual, but fiercely competitive with all other writers.)
The novel was a best seller in hardcover and a huge best seller in paperback the following year, second in sales only to Lord of the Flies. It appeared only a few months before Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened on Broadway. Baldwin and Albee both used anger and obscenity to dig into the darker side of love—Another Country is full of words that were banned from print a year or two earlier: fuck, cunt, cocksucker, and motherfucker. People were excited by the adult rawness of the language and the emotions.
The book had many gay readers, but not all of them liked it. Forty-four-year-old Donald Vining, who worked in the offices of Columbia University, kept a copious diary from 1933 to 1975, which he later published as A Gay Diary in four useful volumes. Vining preferred plays to novels, but he did read Baldwin.
I read late last night… Another Country, which I didn’t like a bit. Baldwin can certainly write but his sex scenes are much too explicit and since his characters’ sex tastes are by no means mine, it’s rather revolting. They seem to share an author’s taste for sweaty bodies, which I find extremely repulsive, and there is always so much crying, gasping, panting, etc.
Sweat aside (much of the novel takes place in the summer), Vining has a point. The sex scenes are written in the language of pulp fiction, and there’s lots of throbbing and thrashing, especially in the straight couplings. Another Country went through many drafts, but the book could have used one more revision to smooth out purple patches and remove repetitions. (Every ten pages or so somebody throws his or her head back and laughs.) But ultimately it doesn’t matter. The chaos of Baldwin’s life probably fed the energy of the book, and that energy and electricity carry the reader through to the end. Even Vining stayed up late to finish it.
But the world did not have much time to digest his novel before Baldwin hit them with something entirely new: a long essay about race published in, of all places, the 1962 Thanksgiving issue of the New Yorker. The original title was “Letter from a Region in My Mind.” A year later it was reprinted as a book, The Fire Next Time.
Ostensibly Baldwin’s account of his dinner with Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Black Muslims, it’s a long, eloquent monologue about the cost of racism in America. Written in the cadences of a sermon, it is built out of extended perorations and the music of words. Like many sermons, it works more from sound than from argument or narrative. It is better written than any of Baldwin’s novels, yet not nearly as expressive or involving. The beautiful phrasing creates a kind of trance music, and there are more generalizations than specifics. Now and then a memorable idea comes out of these lovely clouds, but much of the piece evaporates after it’s read. The strongest idea is the threat of violence promised in the book’s title, which is addressed only in the closing sentences, when he insists that the conscious whites and conscious blacks must, “like lovers,” do everything they can to raise the consciousness of others and “end the racial nightmare.”
If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!
The race riots that did not begin until two years later made this threat seem like the most important part of the essay. Starting in 1965, not a year passed without another inner city erupting in violence: Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark, Chicago, even Washington, D.C. Baldwin looked like a prophet.
A reader in 2010 can’t help being struck by other details, such as Baldwin’s skepticism about “Bobby Kennedy’s assurance that a Negro can become President in forty years.” (He was off by only six years.) A gay reader can’t help noticing some of his own experience echoed in Baldwin’s black experience: “Ask any Negro what he knows about the white people with whom he works. And then ask the white people with whom he works what they know about him.” But the essay is not nearly as valuable now as when it was first published. Its fine phrases and lovely cadences provided educated white readers with a safe place where they could think about the damage of three centuries of racial oppression. It was far harder even to begin to think about such things in 1962 than it is now.
The Fire Next Time came out as a short book in January 1963. Over the next few months, Baldwin’s accelerating career picked up even more speed and shifted into a new direction. Martin Luther King, who met Baldwin in 1957 after the Montgomery bus boycott, organized a prolonged campaign against segregation ordinances in Birmingham, Alabama. Weeks of demonstrations and arrests reached their climax on May 2 when the white cops attacked a march by black schoolchildren with fire hoses and police dogs. TV cameras were present, and the brutality was seen that night on The Huntley-Brinkley Report. The nation was appalled. Two weeks later, Time magazine put Baldwin on their cover as the literary voice of civil rights. The article inside emphasized his essays over his fiction and said nothing about his sexuality—this is the same magazine that three years later attacked homosexuals for poisoning American culture. People forgot Baldwin’s sex life—for now, anyway—while they spoke about black civil rights. Baldwin himself kept it out of his speeches and articles, understandably so. A person can fight only one war at a time.
Within days of appearing on the cover of Time, Baldwin received a phone call from Robert Kennedy, who was now attorney general. A mutual friend, Dick Gregory, had suggested Kennedy talk to Baldwin about what could be done to end the strife in the South. Baldwin visited the Kennedy home in Virginia for breakfast, then arranged a meeting in New York the next day for Kennedy with a few figures whom he thought would help him see the light: singers Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, sociologist Kenneth Clark, actor Rip Torn, and veteran activist Jerome Smith. The meeting did not go well. Tempers were lost; Hansberry walked out, disgusted to be in the room with a powerful man who just didn’t get it. Baldwin and Clark went to a TV studio soon afterward and filmed a conversation that can be seen on YouTube: Clark is calm and collected, but Baldwin, beneath his precise diction and eloquent sarcasm, is still furious. Kennedy finished the meeting angry himself, but later said his anger helped him see the other point of view and committed him more deeply to civil rights.
Events moved still faster. Baldwin traveled all over the country, giving speeches, appearing on television, expressing doubt about the power of black nonviolence against the violence of the Southern whites. He attended the March on Washington and heard King declare, “I have a dream,” but didn’t speak himself. A month later, a black church in Birmingham was firebombed by white supremacists and four little girls were killed. It was another violent turning point. Baldwin appeared on a Sunday morning talk show in New York with the German-born theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. The two men shared their moral shock over the crime. Then Baldwin said that Negroes are “the only hope this country has.” Most Americans “don’t have any longer a real sense of what they live by. I really think it may be Coca-Cola.”
John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November and Lyndon Johnson became president. Baldwin continued to make speeches and write articles, but he also finished a play, Blues for Mr. Charlie.
Inevitably, a backlash set in, from blacks as well as whites. Black critics found him too white-identified, while white critics found him too political. Freedomways magazine criticized Another Country because one did not feel his “love of his people in his writing”—the same criticism that Philip Roth got from fellow Jews for Goodbye, Columbus. But when Blues for Mr. Charlie opened on Broadway in April 1964, starring Diana Sands and Rip Torn, Philip Roth attacked it in the New York Review of Books for being too righteous: “If there is ever a Black Muslim nation, and if there is a television in that nation, then something like Acts Two and Three of Blues for Mr. Charlie will probably be the kind of thing the housewives will watch on afternoon TV.” It was hard to make literature in the 1960s without somebody jumping on you, including fellow artists. A few months later Roth attacked Tiny Alice.
That summer President Johnson succeeded in driving the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress. He then ran for president against Barry Goldwater. On Labor Day, his campaign broadcast the famous “daisy” commercial: a little girl with a flower is juxtaposed with a nuclear explosion and Johnson drawls in voiceover: “We must either love each other or we must die.” One of his speechwriters obviously knew W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” with its famous line, “We must love one another or die.” (Auden complained to a friend, “One cannot let one’s name be associated with shits,” and rashly removed the poem from his Collected Shorter Poems the following year.)
Baldwin was in England in February 1965, invited to Cambridge University to debate the question: “Has the American dream been achieved at the expense of the American Negro?” Arguing in the negative was another American, William F. Buckley, publisher/editor of a new conservative magazine, the National Review. The gray-on-gray television footage of the debate shows Baldwin at his most eloquent, especially in his quiet, damning description of the daily experience of being black in America.
By the time you are thirty, you have been through a kind of mill. And the most serious effect of the mill you’ve been through is not the catalogue of disasters—the policeman, the taxi drivers, the waiters, the landlady, the landlord, the banks, the insurance companies, the millions of details twenty-four hours of every day which spell out to you that you are a worthless human being. It is not that. It is that by that time you’ve begun to see it happening in your daughter or your son or your niece or your nephew.
His bitter emphasis of the words landlady and landlord is electric, enabling us to see real people; his focus on daily humiliations rather than on horrors makes the experience easier for whites to enter imaginatively. Buckley could offer little in response except flick his tongue and murmur a few words about not being too quick to judge America negatively simply because its black population was treated unfairly.
Baldwin was still in England when Malcolm X was assassinated in a mosque in Harlem. Baldwin was called upon to share still more words and more thoughts. He returned to the United States to join King’s protest march from Selma to Montgomery for voter registration. He was photographed walking with Joan Baez.
Meanwhile, Lucien Happersberger had come back into his life, leaving his wife, Suzy, and moving to America. Baldwin fell in love all over again. With Baldwin and his brother David, Happersberger set up a movie company to film Blues for Mr. Charlie. David Leeming, a young Englishman who had met Baldwin in Istanbul, joined them and became Baldwin’s assistant.
In August 1965, the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts erupted in six days of the worst race riots since World War II. More people read The Fire Next Time, treating it as prophetic. Baldwin found himself in still greater demand for speaking engagements, TV, and interviews. But he was exhausted. He was worn out.
Then Happersberger married Diana Sands—Yves from Another Country had fallen in love with Juanita, the heroine of Blues for Mr. Charlie. Baldwin was devastated. He broke off with Happersberger yet again, dissolved the film company and decided to give up New York for Istanbul. The betrayal by Happersberger was only the last straw. He explained his decision in a letter to Leeming, saying he had been living too selflessly and did not want to live like a Henry James character. He asked Leeming to come with him. Leeming later said, “He needed me in his arms as well as his office.” Baldwin expected Leeming to replace Happersberger as his lover. Leeming said no to that, but agreed to come to Istanbul as a secretary. (Leeming can only paraphrase this important letter in his biography, even though it was written to him. The Baldwin estate, which currently means his sister Gloria, refuses to allow his letters to be published or even quoted, since they weren’t intended for the public. As a result, not only is there no edition of Baldwin letters, his biographers must leave out his gritty, living words whenever they use his correspondence.)
Baldwin returned to his small apartment near Istanbul’s busy Taksim Square, but eventually moved to a house on a hill, a nineteenth-century building known as the Pasha’s Library, looking over the Bosphorus. He now followed the civil rights movement from a distance. He published little in 1966, but resumed work on a new novel, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, the first-person life story of a black actor/director recovering from a heart attack.
And so, in November 1966, while Truman Capote threw his glamorous masked ball in New York City, James Baldwin lived a surprisingly orderly life outside Istanbul, writing during the day and drinking only at night, playing host to visiting family and friends, including Beauford Delaney. He deepened his friendship with Engin Cezzar, working with him on screenplays and theater productions. He went for walks in the city, visiting markets and cafés, and he was certainly noticed, but there were no TV cameras.
Baldwin said he loved Istanbul because he did not feel “black” there and his homosexuality did not matter as much as it did in the United States. He said he loved the Turkish people. But in ten years of living off and on in Turkey, he never bothered to learn the language. His own other country was one of badly needed silence.