My great love during those years was from Zurich, the manager of a small chain of Swiss cinemas, whom I met in Venice. I’d been spending several weeks every year in Venice with my best friend, David Kalstone, who lived in New York, taught English at Rutgers, and in the summers lived in Venice. David spoke Italian and loved Venice, a great pedestrian city if you were a good walker, and he was. He was nearly blind, but Venice’s walkways were well lit and the steps over bridges were clearly outlined in white pebbles. It was a city without cars and, though it was awesomely labyrinthine, David knew all its byways. He was a great friend of Peggy Guggenheim and we spent many evenings in her historic, if tedious, company, always accompanied by her little dogs. In her garden (a garden was a rare feature for a Venetian palazzo), Peggy had a white marble Byzantine throne and around it her various shih tzus were buried. Sometimes Peggy herself would sell tickets to her museum and if tourists asked her if Mrs. Guggenheim was still alive, she’d assure them she wasn’t.
Every artistic or political or entertainment personality who came through Venice felt obliged to contact Peggy, and if the dignitary was sufficiently important she’d give him or her a cocktail party. That’s how I first met Gore Vidal, who in those years lived full time in Italy. He blurbed my second novel, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, but later, toward the end of his life, he turned against me because I wrote a play about him and Timothy McVeigh.
I met my Swiss cinema magnate one night on what we called the molo nero, a “dark dock” for cruising, a pathway between the Piazzetta San Marco and Harry’s Bar—by day a major thoroughfare for tourists heading to the vaporetto stop but at night a byway where gays could be found milling around, to the extent that they congregated anywhere in this least gay of all cities. (In those days, they also went to a gay beach out on the Lido, to Haig’s Bar across from the Gritti Palace hotel, and to the public toilets on one side of the Rialto Bridge.) There, on the molo nero, around midnight when the crowds had dissipated (most tourists were day trippers, since hotels in Venice were so expensive), a few gays would linger, though they could be scared off by the glare of approaching boats. One evening, sitting on a fence all dressed in white was a tan, smiling man not in his first youth, closer to my age—a decade younger, as it turned out.
As I approached he said in accented English, “You must be American.”
“I am. How could you tell?”
“The way you smiled at me even though I’m a stranger.”
Later, I thought it must have been my sloppy appearance that gave me away, the fact that my shirt wasn’t tucked in.
I couldn’t imagine why this handsome man would be interested in me, so I said, “You should come back to the palace where I’m staying. It’s pretty spectacular. The kitchen was John Singer Sargent’s studio, and Henry James slept in the library in a sort of medical metal bed.”
I’m not sure he knew who James or Sargent was; the past interested him not at all.
When we were standing in the middle of the immense marble floor of the library, he took my glass from my hand and put it on the floor, then he kissed me passionately.
It turned out that he had my novel A Boy’s Own Story in his bag. His longtime lover, the art dealer Thomas Ammann, who had just broken up with him, had brought back from New York the new gay book everyone was talking about, so I think it pleased This—short for, Matthias and pronounced “Tees”—to have the author of the new vogue book in bed. Thomas had left him for George, a beautiful young Greek man who was a model and who’d just had an affair with Rock Hudson (Hudson’s AIDS had not yet been made public). This was disease-phobic, and used not one but two condoms. (“I’m Swiss,” he explained.) Within a few years both George and Thomas would die of AIDS.
This asked me if I’d been “careful” and of course I said yes, though just the night before I’d slept with a young Spaniard who’d worked my nipples so hard they were still aflame and I winced whenever they were touched. But at that time, in the early eighties, there was no test for AIDS and no one knew exactly what caused it. We suspected it was caused by sex, but how? It seemed too unfair to us that a single exposure could infect someone; in our guilt-ridden way we wanted the disease to be the punishment for a long life of vice.
But even by those standards I’d been what the French called vicieux (a compliment in the world of gay French small advertisements). I’d slept with some three thousand men, I figured, and big-city gay men of my generation asked, “Why so few?” My figures were based on the rate of three a week for twenty years, between the ages of twenty-two and forty-two in New York, but many of my coevals “turned” two or three “tricks” a night, using the whore’s slang of the period (a “trick” was a once-only encounter, a word I had to explain recently to gay grad students). Truth be told, I would often go to the sauna, where I’d meet a dozen men a night. But to This I pretended to be far more innocent. He was reassured and thought of me as a sort of responsible gay leader thanks to my work with Gay Men’s Health Crisis.
I wasn’t ready to change my ways. I was so used to undressing mentally almost every man I met (and often went on to do so literally) that promiscuity was my first response to the least sign of reciprocity. I loved sex, but I never experienced it in its “pure” state; to me, it was always blended with at least some shred of romantic fantasy.
Soon I began to visit This in Zurich every other week and he came to Paris occasionally. When he traveled to my city we stayed on the rue du Cherche-Midi in the beautiful apartment belonging to Andy Warhol and his business associate, Fred Hughes. It was reached by crossing a formal French garden, mainly of gravel, that was dominated by a sphinx with the head of an eighteenth-century female courtier. Inside, in the salon, there were a newly upholstered Second Empire couch and a huge circus painting by José María Sert resting on the floor. The kitchen was the latest in stylishness and efficiency, designed by Andrée Putman, a French woman who looked like a man in drag (“More man than pute,” people said). In her store in the Marais, Putman was recycling designs from the past by Charlotte Perriand and Jean-Michel Frank. Warhol’s apartment looked as if someone with money and taste hadn’t quite moved in.
I wasn’t used to going out with mature men who already had strong opinions and spoke confidently of their defining life experiences. The boys I usually dated tried to fit into my crowded world because they had only the smallest, thinnest world of their own. Their feelings were often hard to sound because they themselves didn’t know what they felt. This knew how people should live and in what surroundings. He had opinions on everything that interested him, and what didn’t interest him he shrugged off. Maybe because he was involved with two visual arts—he exhibited and sometimes produced films and he collected contemporary art—he was very concerned about how everything looked. We spent a whole day at Puiforcat in Paris choosing silverware for his table. He cared how I cut my nails. He didn’t like me to be thirty pounds overweight, so we went to a Swiss spa and ate nothing for ten days. Clothes were important to This. His ex, Thomas, was regularly listed among the ten best-dressed men in the world. Thomas would fly the king of Spain’s tailor from Madrid to Zurich for fittings. They both pioneered the beautifully cut blazer-with-jeans look. Thomas’s cook/maid, who had worked for a Spanish ambassador and knew how to iron shirts expertly, gave ironing lessons to This’s maid. Once when I suggested we go to the Canary Islands for a vacation, This said the only snobbish words I ever heard from his lips: “Oh, that’s where we send our maids for their holidays—Putzfrau Insel, we call it.”
I got an assignment from Lucretia Stewart, then the editor of Departures, the American Express travel magazine, to write about Egypt, and I invited This along as the photographer. It thrilled me to be able to offer him the trip, since I was so much poorer and was always so self-conscious about my gifts to him. He took the assignment very seriously and was up every day before dawn, since the early morning light was the best. We traveled slowly down the Nile from Aswan to Luxor in a Hilton boat, the Osiris, which served wonderful international food and provided us with a luxury cabin at water level. We’d look out our cabin at dawn at the ibises and hoopoes in tall reeds. This had never been to the Third World before and he’d agreed to come along to Egypt with much trepidation. Travel for him had always been traumatic. When he was a child, the first time he’d crossed the Alps into Germany in a car with his father, he’d fainted, so frightened was he to leave Switzerland for Germany.
This knew a woman who worked for the Swiss embassy in Cairo who managed to get us a hotel room looking out directly on the Great Pyramid. And in Luxor, she put us up in the old Winter Palace, King Farouk’s former palace, in a room with a big, dusty balcony overlooking a huge, scraggly garden complete with monkeys. Outside our door, a servant slept on the floor, ever ready to serve us. Servitude of that sort bothered me, but I didn’t want to object lest the man be dismissed and plunged into total poverty. In Aswan, we stayed at the old Cataract Palace, with its louvered wood shutters, ceiling fans, and balconies facing the Nile. We felt we were in an Agatha Christie novel, and we pitied those tourists who’d ended up in the new, Stalinist-cement Cataract Palace.
This had an exaggerated respect for me as “an artist” and would never let me pay for anything: “Because you are an artist—artists should never pay!” He also had a Swiss respect for work and he exaggerated how hard and long I worked on my books; I had an equal but opposite Anglophile adherence to my amateur status and a corresponding disdain for work, and I exaggerated how easy it all was: “First drafts only!” In fact, I labored over my manuscripts and walked around town sounding out phrases in my head, but I wanted to pretend it all came effortlessly to me; that was my myth of myself.
He seemed torn between his cult of friendship and sincerity and his pursuit of celebrities. He wanted to keep up the valuable friendships he’d made through Thomas. Valuable to Thomas, who said it was easy to sell paintings by famous artists but hard to find them. That’s where the celebrities came in, since they often knew collectors who needed to sell. At the same time This didn’t want to admit he was motivated by feelings other than natural affection and admiration.
As a result he spoke with heightened affection, even love, of even the celebrities I found the most vacuous: “Oh, I love Bianca. She is so intelligent, fighting for her little country at the UN. And she’s so warm, like a sister to me—she sleeps in bed with me, hugging me!”
Everyone famous he approved of, usually in ecstatic terms. “He’s the most wonderful man on earth, so kind, so generous.” His unrelenting esteem for everyone rubbed off on me, and my friends said that suddenly I was a bit Pollyannaish and no longer so tart tongued. The French weren’t sure they approved of so much enthusiasm. But it wasn’t really a matter of national character but of class. This and his successful friends were confident enough to be able to approve of people; my loser friends (except the ones in AA) only rose in their own opinion if they denigrated everyone else.
This went with Thomas every Christmas to Gstaad, where he and Thomas were among the few Swiss who rented a chalet. Most of the real Swiss millionaires were too tight-fisted to spend a hundred thousand dollars a month on a rented chalet. The old women, the real Swiss gnomes, did their own housework, drove a ten-year-old Mercedes, ate at the local vegetarian cafeteria and had the biggest savings accounts on the planet. They wore brown woolen stockings and black sensible shoes. In Gstaad This and Thomas hobnobbed with Valentino and Elizabeth Taylor and Gunther Sachs, a German playboy they knew, as well as with a Belgian banker-baron I’d had sex with. Gunther Sachs had been married to Brigitte Bardot and was the iconic playboy of the 1960s. He committed suicide at Gstaad in 2011 when he discovered he had Alzheimer’s. My Belgian baron was an ugly but sexy and intelligent man who died of AIDS early on. His sister-in-law remained my friend, as did her husband, my friend’s brother. He, the brother, was very handsome and had once been the lover of Rita Hayworth, but he was a bit dull. The sister-in-law said that as long as the fascinating gay brother-in-law was alive she had someone in the family to talk to. After he died she had to make do with her beautiful but dumb husband.
Although I make the eighties sound lighthearted and frivolous, I was haunted by AIDS, as were most gay men. I was diagnosed as positive in 1985. Although a diagnosis has galvanized many writers, I just pulled the covers over my head for a year. I was very depressed. I felt so isolated and read about ACT UP in America with envy. I belonged to no AIDS community in France. Larry Kramer attacked me for devoting seven years of my post-diagnosis time to Genet. Larry felt every gay writer must write about AIDS alone. I wanted to remind readers that there were these great gay contemporaries (Genet died in 1986) who had nothing to do with the disease. Our experience couldn’t be reduced to a malady. I didn’t want us to be “re-medicalized.”
I survived because I turned out to be one of those rare creatures, a slow progressor: someone whose T-cell counts fall steadily but very slowly (nonprogressors are those even rarer men and women who never get sick). I didn’t know that when I was diagnosed; I thought I’d be dead in a year or two. I’m not a mystic and I don’t meditate, but one day in 1986 when I was meditating, in my amateurish, mud-pie way, I interrogated my body and it told me I was going to survive. It was not until ten years later that my doctor explained to me why I’d survived. People tried to ascribe my longevity to my Texas genes or my newfound sobriety, but I knew it was just a freak of nature and I could claim none of the merit just as the victims couldn’t be blamed.
This insisted we be tested in the mid-eighties. The test had just become available and a blood sample had to be sent all the way from Zurich to San Francisco, then the results had to be mailed back—a three-week procedure. Nor would the doctor, an arrogant young heterosexual who’d interned in San Francisco, give the results over the phone. I had to make the trip from Paris to Zurich to have a consultation in person. As we were going up the snowy path to the university hospital, This suddenly chickened out. I was the one who insisted we keep our appointment. I already knew in my heart that he, with his two condoms, would be negative, whereas I, with my thousands of tricks, would surely be positive. I said that to This and added, “I’m a good enough novelist to predict you’ll be very tender and kind with me and within a year you’ll break up with me.”
Sure enough, the beautiful young doctor leaned back in his office chair; he’d crossed his legs and now pointed at me with one of his expensive, light tan lace-up shoes and said, “You. You’re positive.” Then he swiveled and indicated This with his shoe: “You. You’re negative.” He’d just delivered a death sentence to me, for all we knew, but there was no follow-up, no appointments made with a counselor.
For some time This and I had planned a romantic trip to Vienna. We went that afternoon. We stayed in the city’s oldest hotel, the König von Üngarn, right in the shadow of St. Stephen’s Cathedral. Of course it was all beautiful and we had time to visit Mozart’s apartment around the corner, but that night I was in anguish and couldn’t sleep, not because I was afraid of dying but because I knew my wonderful adult romance with This was doomed. I kept getting out of bed and going to the toilet, which was at the end of a long corridor. There, at a safe distance, I’d close the door and sob. I felt so bereft. On my third trip to the bathroom This woke up and padded down the hall and comforted me, though with my bleak “realism” (my most French attribute) I was profoundly inconsolable.
This invited me once to Gstaad, but since I don’t ski and was in the throes of writing my best short story, “An Oracle,” I shut myself away in the chalet and didn’t even attend Liz Taylor’s party. I do remember that Liz gave Pashmina shawls to all her guests. (I eventually met Liz and Audrey Hepburn when they were auctioning art in Basel for an AIDS charity.) The central piece of gossip that year was that everyone laughed at Valentino for thinking Tina Turner was going to come and be the guest of honor at his Christmas party. He declared her the greatest singer of our day, but when she turned him down he called her “a washed-up cow.” Stories like this were endlessly repeated—as well as ones that pictured Thomas’s new love, the beautiful George, as an idiot and a gold digger.
The jet set, I concluded, amused itself by attacking one member or another. They were led by “Zip,” Nancy Reagan’s friend and gay walker, the New York socialite and real estate heir Jerry Zipkin. Their conversation consisted mainly of their schedules—where they’d been and where they were going. If you weren’t going to Gstaad or Venice or Marrakesh or New York or Paris, they lost interest in you. Many of them were interested in the business of art, and they flew to art auctions in various countries or to Art Basel in Basel or eventually to its sister exhibition in Miami. They thought collecting art somehow made them artistic and bohemian. After all, most rich people collected cars or houses or jewels or wives.
There was always a lot of drama at table. Once Thomas was seated next to the rich British Picasso collector Douglas Cooper. When Thomas bragged he’d just bought a Picasso from a dealer in Italy and described the canvas, Cooper stood up and said, “That painting was stolen from my château in France, and you must hand it over immediately or I’ll denounce you to the police.”
Ever so coolly, Thomas replied, “Please stop threatening me. Switzerland has no legal reciprocity or extradition agreement with France. If you don’t ask for it nicely, I’ll put it up for auction—with all the proceeds going to a Swiss orphanage.”
Cooper backed off quickly and Thomas returned the painting at a tremendous loss.
In This’s modern jewel-box apartment on the Zurichberg I always felt like someone from the Third World. I was so afraid of breaking something or smelling something up (from This I’d learned to light a match in the toilet after shitting to disguise the odor).
He had a little side table by Jean-Michel Franck that was worth fifty thousand dollars. His couch was by Jean Royère, the great French furniture designer of the fifties. The lights in their brightly colored canisters were fifties Stilnovo from Milan. Over the fireplace was a big Mao drawing by Warhol, which showed what a great draftsman he could be when he set his mind to it. On another wall was a Warhol hammer and sickle painting. I suppose these Communist subjects were less costly because less popular among the airhead rich. On the floor were beautiful rugs of sea grass bound with cloth at the borders. Above the couch was a huge beach scene by Eric Fischl. This often said this painting comprised his retirement fund. When he needed an extra million for his old age, he’d just sell the Fischl. He also had a disturbing Francesco Clemente in his bedroom, a self-portrait with a knife in his guts and bloody-looking Italian words. Up and down the staircase of his apartment were photographic portraits of contemporary artists, including the monklike Clemente by Jeannette Montgomery Barron. This probably wouldn’t like me describing his apartment, for fear of robbers or the Swiss internal revenue. When the French version of House & Garden described and photographed the malachite collection of one of my friends, burglars wasted no time stealing it, while leaving untouched other objects worth much more. No one in This’s social circle wanted their house featured in a magazine spread.
Of course, This had many friends and entertained often. Like MC, he called up people all over the world and received them generously whenever they came to Zurich. His apartment with its bright colors, luxurious furniture, and many lights sparkled when guests arrived. There was a separate apartment upstairs for guests. His table always looked beautiful with its Hermès plates, Puiforcat silverware, and lots of small bouquets. The food, which he prepared himself, was always exquisite and often ended with a homemade kumquat sherbet. Around his table, I met John Waters; the photography collector Baroness Marion Lambert; Bice Curiger, a curator of the Kunsthaus Zurich; Jacqueline Burckhardt, an editor of Parkett and the granddaughter of Jacob Burckhardt, the art historian who invented the concept of “the Renaissance”—and many other beautiful and fascinating people. Bob Colacello, the Warhol biographer, regaled us with tales of his encounters with King Victor Emmanuel’s aged daughters living in exile in Portugal. He, who’d grown up a poor Italian American in Brooklyn, was thrilled to be able to show his old mother pictures of the royal Italian princesses.
For Bice and Jacqueline, I wrote several articles for Parkett, including one on two Princes: Prince, the pop singer and composer, and Richard Prince, the photographer and master of appropriations.
This was my first and maybe only grown-up affair. It was a comfort and challenge to spend time with a mature, successful man, a fully formed personality, someone who could trace the contours of his personality, who was never undecided about his tastes, who understood his aversions, who had opinions. Most of my boyfriends had been twenty or thirty years younger than I and poor and dependent on me—very safe for me. I had always had the upper hand. This was sufficiently different from me to keep me enthralled. I’d known about contemporary art in the sixties, the heyday of Pop Art. While working at Time-Life Books in New York, at lunchtime I’d gone to a gallery nearly every day. Then I’d lost track of all the new developments, though in the early 1970s, when I’d been the arts editor of another magazine, I’d learned a lot about contemporary painting from our art critic, David Bourdon, who’d previously been the art critic for Life.
Now, ten years later, I was catching up. Thomas had a beautiful series of self-portraits in pastel by Francesco Clemente, including one where he was exploring his own bowels, candle in hand; over his fireplace hung a powerful, iconic horse by Susan Rothenberg. He had a stenciled portrait of himself by Warhol. Thomas’s idea was to collect paintings done since the early Warhol and to deal in paintings done from the Impressionists up to the Warhol “disaster” series and the electric chairs. That way he’d never be in competition with his clients to secure a prize painting.
As a novelist, I was intrigued by the economics of painting. Whereas serious novelists, even celebrated ones, could barely survive, the top painters were very rich. It was all because a painting was a unique object whereas a book was a multiple. No wonder so many writers turned to the visual arts—Burroughs to painting and Ginsberg to photography. That was the only way they could make money. (Ginsberg also got a million dollars for his archives.)
It took ten critics, two dealers, and twenty collectors to get an artist on the cover of Time, whereas a novelist had to convince eighty thousand readers to buy his book to win a comparable fame. For this reason, the painters could be more daringly experimental than the writers, who had to please so many more culture consumers, many of them with brows firmly in the middle. Painting—and heavily subsidized arts like ballet and poetry and “serious” music—were obliged to be avant-garde in order to seem flamboyantly original. Fiction and theater, which were expected to earn their own keep, had to maintain a broader appeal.
This knew both the painting world and that of cinema (which needed thousands of paying customers in order to survive). Certainly feature films were doubly cursed, since they needed a huge fan base in each city to fill those theater seats, whereas a novel could go out into the wide world and nab a reader here and another one there—no more than half a dozen in any one city.
This invited me to the Cannes and Berlin Film Festivals for many years in the eighties. They were completely different from each other. In Cannes, we’d stay at the Carlton, the chicest “palace” along the Croisette. Would-be starlets would hold bikini sessions on the beach nearby for amateur male photographers. Huge billboards all over Cannes advertised the newest films. The major films in competition would be screened in an ugly modern building accessible only by the red-carpeted stairs. Invited members of the audience in evening clothes would mount the two dozen stairs to the exhibition hall while velvet ropes and policemen held back the adoring crowds and busy photographers. Even though it was only May, the days were already long because France is so far north, and it was strange seeing all these heavily made-up female stars in strapless sequined gowns in broad daylight. The men had to be in tuxedos, no exceptions, though once a handsome young guy went nude with the tux painted on his body and he got in—after all, it was all show business, feverishly in pursuit of as much publicity as possible.
A typical day at Cannes was at once somnolent and exhausting. Since This was the manager of five cinemas in Zurich and since his rivals, who managed national chains, got all the blockbusters, he had to run after all those “interesting” movies made by Belgians or Taiwanese, films that would presumably receive good reviews. We would see as many as five films during the day in what was called the marketplace. He provided me with full accreditation as his assistant. My parents had not permitted me as a child to see many films, no more than one a year, considering them an unhealthy influence. As a result now I was overly sensitive to anything occurring on screen and would scream bizarrely if a close-up showed an actress breaking a nail. Anything sad made me cry and when it was all over I said to This that I felt like a Japanese court lady out of Sei Shōnagon; I’d spent five days in dark rooms weeping.
I suppose the two biggest evenings I had at the Croisette were both in 1985: Rendez-vous, with Juliette Binoche in her first leading role—everyone knew right away that a star was being born—and Paul Schrader’s Mishima. Schrader and his wife, the actress Mary Beth Hurt, were friends of This and had been traumatized because they’d just been held up by thieves while they were looking at the view from a turnoff near the French-Italian border. The sets and costumes in Mishima were sumptuous, the whole film was beautifully conceived, and it won the Palme d’Or.
We would dash from seeing two or three films in the morning (This would often fall asleep in his seat) to the beach, which was partitioned into expensive cabanas with lounge chairs. We’d take the sun and have our lunch while tall, elegant Africans threaded their way among the bronzing white people offering for sale African carvings and jewelry no one bought. After lunch, we’d go see more films—at the old competition palace, where there was a director’s festival, or back to the marketplace scattered among the city’s various commercial cinema theaters. In the evening we’d don our tuxes and head for the red-carpet events or we’d grab a drink in the lobby and bar of the Carlton, which was thronged with propped-up cardboard promotional cutouts. Dozens of paparazzi clustered around the entrance on the lookout for stars. We had drinks with Spike Lee, who was just beginning to be known. I wasn’t really used to being the quiet little sidekick. It’s a very tiring role, and of course no one knew who I was. It gave me a new appreciation of what John Purcell must have felt all the time, although John seemed suited to his role as sidekick/son/wife/kid brother. And yet I wondered how happy anyone could be playing second fiddle. No matter how wifely his fantasies, every man is brought up to be the first violin.
No one lingered long because everyone was looking for producers and distributors. It struck me that although a movie required hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars to make, most of the actual filmmakers were poor and perennially broke. In this crowd at the Carlton bar, everyone was trying to put together a deal. In Europe a film typically received a third of its money from distributors in the form of an advance against eventual receipts, a third from a TV channel, and a third from government subsidies or private producers. This last source of funding was the hardest to find, and all these half-shaved, half-bathed directors were scrambling around in search of money, their beseeching faces and politeness at odds with their bohemian backgrounds.
Late at night there were big parties in the area in the hills known as La Californie, in elegant rented villas. The Weinstein brothers and other moguls would be holding court. Metal torches were planted in the ground. Hundreds of Yugoslav or Greek or Taiwanese directors came out from under a log for funding or a free meal of hot hors d’oeuvres. Before Cannes, I’d assumed movie people were well heeled and that their money came to them in regular, foreseeable ways. I would never have guessed how improvised their financing was. Cannes (unlike the Venice Film Festival) was more devoted to wheeling and dealing than to pure cinema.
If Cannes could be symbolized by a white fur draped over a bikini, Berlin was cold and grimly serious, typified by dirty-haired intellectuals viewing a six-hour Bulgarian film about a failed businessman. Because This spoke German somewhat more easily than French or Italian or Spanish (though he was fluent in these languages as well), he felt more at home in Berlin—even though he’d been attending Cannes since the Sixties. In Berlin he had a secret language, Swiss German, which real Germans couldn’t understand. He would discuss money or business with other Swiss friends in Switzerdeutsch and no one knew what they were saying. He did so only in an emergency. Normally he spoke his guests’ language. I’d leave a table of Zurichois to go to the toilet and when I came back they would still be speaking in English. The French would never have been that polite. First, they wouldn’t all have been fluent in English, and second, they wouldn’t all have continued in a foreign tongue longer than a minute if they outnumbered the anglophones. Perhaps that’s the difference between a big country and a small one—moreover one like Switzerland with four national languages. When This and I went to Egypt it was with a Swiss tour in which the guides repeated everything in both German and French. No one got impatient. We even traveled with a mother and her grown son from Basel; she spoke to him in German and he replied in French. I once had to wait for someone in the lobby of a grand hotel in Switzerland. The young woman concierge chatted amiably with clients in French, Italian, German, Swiss German, and English without any apparent transition or hesitation. Movies in Switzerland often had subtitles in two or even three languages, which ate up the bottom third of the screen. As a child, This had been sent every summer to French-language camp in the western part of Switzerland. The Swiss French only rarely spoke German, and only those Swiss Italians who actually lived in the north knew German, while most of the Swiss Germans knew at least English and French.
One year in Berlin, the self-created it-girl Pia Zadora astonished the German journalists when she gave them a bikini session in the swimming pool in the old Kempinski Hotel Bristol on the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin. She also summoned them to her glamorous airport arrival when she walked down the stairs in a chinchilla coat—Germans weren’t used to stars of that magnitude. They were used to Tilda Swinton or Klaus Kinski talking about their roles as an English hermaphrodite or a suicidal Austrian homosexual. But Pia’s diminutive, sunny disposition, delicious child’s body and rich girl accoutrements were out of their range. Her very rich husband was an Israeli industrialist. He paid for billboards advertising her questionable talents as a disco singer and movie star along Sunset Boulevard back in Hollywood. She was made for John Waters.
The Berlin festival was in January, the coldest time of the year. It took me back to my adolescence in Chicago, my fear of freezing before I got home. I spent a lot of time alone and went to the Mövenpick cafeteria for my meals since the only German food word I knew was Kalbsleber (“calf’s liver”) and I quickly got tired of that. In spite of my nonexistent language skills, we went several times to the theater, where we saw plays I already knew and could follow (like Chekhov’s Three Sisters in 1984). Occasionally I’d be stuck in a new four-hour German play in which the characters were crawling across a huge, bleak rock surface.
Three Sisters, starring Edith Clever and directed by Peter Stein, was a breakthrough in what I joked was a daring experiment called “realism.” There were real birds on stage, confined by a nearly invisible wire net. The actors all left the stage to eat dinner in another room, not visible but audible to the audience. We could hear the clinking of silverware and plates and the shrieks of women’s laughter and the murmur of conversation. This went on for a very long time.
Once in Munich we went to see the reclusive director Werner Schroeter, who was editing his 1986 film, Der Rosenkönig, starring Magdalena Montezuma. We also spent time with the handsome, if drug- and AIDS-ravaged, film actor Dieter Schidor. Schidor usually played German soldiers in films like Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron. He also produced and played in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s last film, Querelle, based on Genet’s novel, in which Brad Davis, Franco Nero, and Jeanne Moreau also acted. Apparently he’d had sex with the American writer Gary Indiana in an oven at Dachau while they were both tripping. Gary wrote about it in his 1993 novel Gone Tomorrow. When Dieter found out he had AIDS, he sold an expensive painting and traveled extensively. At last he was ready to commit suicide and took tranquilizers and sat in a tub full of hot water. The idea was that he’d doze off, sink under the surface and drown. A woman friend discovered him still alive days later and “saved” him, so that he could die a horrible death in a hospital ward weeks later, his body still recovering from the hot water burns he’d sustained over three days in the tub.
There was something perverse and eccentric about all the people who’d once surrounded Fassbinder. Although he was gay, Fassbinder had a wife, Ingrid Caven, to whom he was married from 1970 to 1972. She told us that once when she was in the States, she was broke and got a gig through the actor Peter Chatel to dub Deep Throat into German.
“I knew Rainer disliked porno and would never see it, and since I needed the money, I went ahead.”
Then one day, stopping in front of a cinema in Munich, Fassbinder had said, “This is that movie everyone’s talking about. Let’s go in and see it.”
“Oh, no, darling, it will be boring,” Caven said modestly.
Fassbinder insisted, and according to her the minute Caven’s first groan was heard he turned in his seat and slapped her and said, “Slut!”
We saw Caven in a strange ragtag evening onstage put together by Rosa von Praunheim. Later, in 1989, I saw her in Paris singing Édith Piaf’s repertory at the Plaza l’Athenée Theater. She was wearing a backless floor-length dress that Yves Saint Laurent had designed for her.
I once spent an evening in a garden in Paris with her and Maria Schneider, who was no longer the curvaceous teenager of the 1972 Bertolucci film, Last Tango in Paris, in which her character was sodomized by the much older Marlon Brando character using butter as a lubricant. I’d seen the film in Italy, and when the now-infamous scene began everyone in the audience was exclaiming “Burro, burro!”
Schneider felt traumatized by the movie and her fame and had turned to drugs, which had left her once-beautiful face ravaged. That night she was with her female lover, Pia, whom she credited with saving her. Caven was with Jean-Jacques Schuhl, a French writer who in 2000 won the Prix Goncourt for his novel Ingrid Caven—not a biography but a highly fragmented novel. Both Ingrid Caven and Maria Schneider had been in scores of films and survived decades of being sex goddesses.
Caven was often with Rosa von Praunheim, who, in spite of his name, was a man and a very sexy one at that in black leather pants. He’d defiantly assumed the name “Rosa” to recall the pink triangles that homosexuals had been forced to wear in the Nazi death camps. He, too, had made scores of underground films, most notably his 1973 hit It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse but the Society in Which He Lives. In 1992 Praunheim made a documentary about Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, an elderly drag queen who’d survived the Nazi and the Communist regimes, although it later came out that she’d collaborated with the Communists. Mahlsdorf lived in the Gründerzeit Museum in East Berlin, which she’d built to house artifacts of everyday life from around 1900 that she’d found at the dump and flea markets. The owners of the gay bookstore Prinz Eisenherz in West Berlin drove me there so I could meet her. She greeted us in a maid’s uniform at the entrance. The “museum” was filled with the conventional middle-class trappings of the period. There was a huge Swiss music box that played yard-wide metal disks. On the landing leading to the basement kitchen and a detailed recreation of an old Berlin gay bar, there was a vitrine filled with Charlotte’s sadistic leather accoutrements. Years later, in 2003, after she was dead, I saw the Pulitzer Prize–winning play about her, I Am My Own Wife, starring Jefferson Mays and written by a Texan, Doug Wright. From the play I learned that after the Berlin Wall came down and the Stasi files were opened, it was revealed that Charlotte had denounced people she knew in the antiques world. I thought anyone who survived the Nazis and the Communists as a transvestite must have made some serious compromises.
My This, with his beautiful clothes and kindness, gemütlich manners and eternal smile, was a striking contrast to these weird Germans with their perversions, drugs, and conversational directness. Once I asked Thomas, who’d grown up in Switzerland on the German frontier, if he’d ever run across the border to play with German kids, and Thomas shook his head and said, “No, my parents thought they were too dirty.” This often made fun of himself (while, it occurred to me, half bragging) by referring to himself as a simple peasant boy from the mountains, and I gather that in Swiss German he had a comically rustic accent. But in a way he seemed as pure as a mountain stream.
The Germans always seemed to rub the French the wrong way, all the stranger since the French liked to act awestruck by the monuments of German philosophy, art, music, and literature.
A beautiful young woman who was a Berlin journalist and looked like a boy came to dinner in Paris. Ina worked for a left-wing Berlin journal. At the time, I was still researching my Genet biography, and my other friends were all French Genet scholars. Ina also wrote about Proust, Musil, and Jelinek. At a certain point in the evening, Ina said, “Now let me understand. All the men here are gay and all the women are straight, is that right?”
You could almost hear the deflating horns descending, wah wah wah. Her question put everyone out of sorts, since French life is built on the possibility of seduction, on the unsaid (le non-dit). By spelling everything out, she’d threatened to end the game of flirtation. Of course an American—at least one with enough self-confidence—might have blurted out the same question, too, since we don’t like the murk of sexual ambiguity either. I suppose the Americans and the Germans are more alike than the French and the Germans.
Sometime in the mid-eighties, I made a trip to Berlin for Vogue with the photographer Dominique Nabokov. She was the widow of the composer Nicolas Nabokov, the great writer’s cousin. For years Nicolas had organized the Festival of Europe, which had turned out to be a CIA scheme for promoting a non-Communist left wing in Western Europe. Because of her husband’s old connections, Dominique knew “everyone” in Berlin. We interviewed Aribert Reimann, who’d written the opera Lear for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. I also spoke to Otto Schily, a founder of the Green Party and a member of the Bundestag. Schily predicted the imminent reunification of East and West Germany, which no one else was talking about. He said that the sense of everyone being German, East and West, was stronger than the Communist/capitalist divide. I was further shocked when he assured me reunification would come soon. All the more so when one of This’s friends, Karsten Witte, a film critic, arranged for me to go to East Berlin with two doctor friends of his, husband and wife, who drove me around the city. I was sitting in the backseat and within a few minutes the doctors pointed out that someone official was tailing us. The authorities stopped us and asked me why I was taking notes. I said it was for Vogue, just some banalities about the city, and they let us go.
This and I went to a beautiful, newly refurbished neoclassical theater in the East that had been run by Bertolt Brecht when he was alive. We saw The Threepenny Opera performed there by the Berliner Ensemble in a very scanty, impoverished production that brought out the plight of the poor, spunky characters. Near the theater was one of the few gay bars the regime permitted to stay open. The people there were shabby, friendly, and alcoholic, and many of the clients were women. No wonder people said the East was more genuine and “real” than the West, though few elected to live there, except the Mauerspringer (“wall jumper”), who’d confounded everyone by jumping the wall from the West to the East, then written a book about it.
Years later, after the Wall came down (on November 9, 1989), This and I ate at a trendy restaurant facing the splendors of the French Cathedral, the neoclassical Huguenot church on Berlin’s most beautiful square, the Gendarmenmarkt. I went to the nearby flea market where hordes of Eastern Europeans were selling off their most treasured belongings for relative pennies, and the whole thing was terribly sad. Wanting to help one Russian man, I bought an icon from him. It was smoke-blackened from centuries of votive candles. The history of Europe and, it seemed, of my time in Europe was turning another terrible, irreversible corner.
We were always there in the winter, which was so much more severe than in Paris, where it rarely snows. But for me, Berlin was epitomized by old women in galoshes crowding into one of the many concert halls. The novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, who lived there for many years, told me that his Asian wife was repeatedly kicked by these old ladies in the bus. Since she was beautiful and young and Asian, they assumed she was a prostitute.
When I’d spoken to students in English in an old-fashioned wooden amphitheater, they’d all drummed their feet on the hollow-sounding floors instead of applauding. When I read to them from my complex, not entirely successful novel Caracole, a pimply male student attacked me for writing in a cultured “Thomas Mann style,” as if that were a terrible sin, and for recording painful events that had happened to me when I was much younger rather than reporting my current angst.
I knew from Nabokov’s novel The Gift that Berlin could be a summer paradise of interlocking lakes and nude swimming, but maybe Berlin was no longer entirely like that. I’d seen nudism in Munich’s English Garden, where there is also a perpetual cataract of cold water along the Eisbach, in which boys surfed in their wetsuits atop an up-gush—sometimes frozen in the hang-ten for minutes, their bodies tense and bulging beneath their Neoprene skins.
This had a social energy that astounded me. Whereas writers must guard against too much socializing in order to work, for This work was socializing. He was tirelessly cheerful, never moody, always perfectly turned out, always “on,” though later he treasured his solitude in his mountain ski house in the Engadine; often he’d stay there with just his dog, Lumpi, for weeks on end. I could be social and most people considered me gregarious, but too much chitchat left me exhausted. This liked to sit alone and work his way through hundreds of cinema magazines in an effort to keep up.
Later, in my sixties, I became grotesquely fat. Although everyone in his world was slim, This wasn’t embarrassed by my looks, since I was no longer his lover and didn’t reflect badly on him. He turned me into a mildly comical character, “Professor Bear,” bumbling and bewildered and endearing. But at the same time he continued to buy industrial quantities of my books and give them as Christmas presents to his often confused friends, who were uncertain what to think of these “gifts.” Poor This lost both the great love of his life, Thomas, and Elisabeth, the woman he lived with for years (he was living with her when we first met). Waiters in Zurich called her his wife (though maybe frau is more ambiguous). She was a glamorous blonde but did so much cocaine that she drove her dress shop into the ground; This lectured her, which only alienated her. She moved out. In Cairo we had a green satin bedspread made for her; This thought she’d look like a Hollywood star lying on it with her long blonde hair. Once I brought her a new, light, flowery perfume from Paris. Since she was “known,” she told me, for wearing Chanel No. 5, she said she’d wear the new perfume to sleep in. Eventually This talked of her less and less often. She had a shiftless lover This didn’t approve of. And then one day he told me she had died.
Though he had what seemed a sun-drenched life, his childhood with a tyrannical father and an unloving stepmother had been so grim he seldom spoke of it, and even his adulthood was marked by these unexpected deaths of his intimates. There was something steely inside him that had been forged out of his abusive childhood; I recognized this cold, untouchable core because I had it, too, underneath my amiability. We were both survivors.
After I was diagnosed with HIV, This was afraid of me. We grew apart, as I’d predicted. I wept often over my lost love and felt abandoned. Death was my constant shadow. My mother said to me, “It’s normal for someone like me in her eighties to lose a friend every month, but it’s strange for someone like you in his forties.” I was attentive but not devoted to my dying friends; I thought, My time will come. I can’t suffer through this repeatedly.