10
It was a hot, sticky summer day in 1966, and my sister’s friend Carol invited me to a party. I got off the subway at Houston Street and walked the remaining few blocks to her building. As I neared the address, I saw a beautiful redhead in a flowing hippie dress and blouse get out of a taxi and enter the same building. I waited for her to go inside and start up the stairs. I didn’t want her to think a creepy person was following her into the building.
Carol lived on the fifth floor of a five-floor walk-up. When I reached the top of the stairs, she was greeting the redhead I had seen downstairs. Then I received the same warm hello. I hadn’t seen Carol in a while, and we spent several minutes catching up before she motioned me farther inside to meet people and enjoy myself. It wasn’t long before I realized I was the only guy at the party—at least the only one I saw. I got it: Carol was a lesbian—and so, it appeared, were many of her friends.
I was an incorrigible and innocent flirt (and still am), and the mix at Carol’s only made flirting more interesting. I was having a good conversation with several women when Carol pulled me away and introduced me to her redheaded friend. Her name was Rachel, and I sensed that Carol wasn’t simply making sure all her guests met each other, she was also playing matchmaker. It was a good call. Rachel and I spoke for a while, and we were into each other from the start. She was attractive and bright, and eager to share her interests in music, literature, religion, art, politics, science, and metaphysics.
If it seems like she was a lot, she was. At a certain point she put her hand on my arm and let it drift with a feathery lightness down to my hand, before giving it a slight squeeze. “Don’t go anywhere,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” She returned a few moments later with a mug of hot tea in each hand. One for me, one for her.
We sat down on a sofa and continued to talk. Time sped up and I began to feel strange. The change was slow, but then something hit me. I felt Rachel reassuringly squeeze my hand. She said something, her voice a soft pillow. My anxiety melted away and with each breath, I experienced a warm feeling, a sensitivity, a spiritual sensation, and I sensed my mind opening to layers of existence that I was seeing for the very first time.
Rachel smiled, told me to relax, and explained that our tea contained LSD. She asked if I had heard of Timothy Leary and said that she had spent time with the former Harvard professor and his friends, taking LSD at his mansion upstate in Millbrook, New York. We were starting to trip, she said.
Ah, so that’s what was going on. Okay. I felt good. The room pulsed. Things vibrated. Colors swirled. I saw auras and patterns in the air. Time as I knew it ceased to matter, I was in the moment, sailing along on the river of the present, and whenever I looked up, Rachel was watching me, smiling, her eyes gentle and warm, her long red hair swirling, surging, rippling…so beautiful.
In retrospect, one might ask about the etiquette of giving someone LSD without warning them first. I don’t recall ever having that thought. And who knows, maybe she did ask and I can’t remember. After she brought us tea, the details are smudged. It was what it was, and I leaned into the situation with curiosity and deep and important thoughts about…
Life.
And God.
And existence.
And…poetry, art, music, people…sex…and beauty.
So much beauty in the world.
I returned to the present. The party had thinned to a small group of people, and I noticed out the window the bright summer sky had turned to night. I was in no hurry to go anywhere. In fact, I used Carol’s phone to call two friends of mine, Billy and Carol, an actor and a painter, respectively, and invited them to come over and drink some tea with us. I described what I’d been feeling and seeing, the thoughts I was having, and the mellow way I still felt, and said they should come try it for themselves. They declined.
I was still at Carol’s when the sun came up the next morning. I was tired, but not where I craved sleep; it was more of a relaxed afterglow of my trip. I hurried home to clean up and change clothes. My parents’ close friend Dr. Jones had died earlier in the week, and his funeral was later that day.
I met my family at church. My sister noticed something about me was off. Explaining that I’d been out late, I took a seat in the back, where I shut my eyes and listened to the service while my thoughts drifted in and out of the present, thinking back to what I’d been through the past twenty-some hours but also sifting through the many warm memories I have of our dear family friends Dr. Jones and his wife and family. I remember leaving the church feeling love for them and my own family, and…just love.
Rachel and I had exchanged numbers. From what she had told me, her background was unlike that of any woman I had ever known. She had been a drug addict, a dealer, a prostitute, and a professional jazz singer. She was a hard-core social and political activist. And with me, she fancied herself a guide to higher consciousness. It wasn’t like she tried to turn on just anyone, she had explained, but upon meeting me at Carol’s party, she sensed I was searching for something, and it made her think I either needed to or was ready to explore a deeper meaning to my existence. Her intuition was spot-on.
But before we spent much time together, Rachel traveled down south to deal with legal issues stemming from a civil rights demonstration at which she had been arrested. A short time later, she went back there to serve a brief sentence. I admired her conviction and willingness to battle on the front lines. She lived in a one-room walk-up on Second Avenue, and while she was gone, Corey and I took care of her cats. Once she was back, I moved in with her. She was highly educated, open, aware, and curious. She understood the frustration I had with my career, and when I admitted to having considered suicide, she put her arms around me and cried.
I cut myself off from everyone and everything while I was with Rachel, and we became inseparable, hermits to a higher purpose. We took LSD together, talked, meditated, made love, and read. Rachel gave me a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, which we read out loud together, and a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. I studied Eastern philosophy and Buddhism and read P. D. Ouspensky’s writing on Gurdjieff, the Russian philosopher who searched for the miraculous. I also read Carl Jung and his ideas on the subconscious.
I was very intrigued with Gurdjieff’s concept that life might extend beyond the three dimensions we knew about, and into the fourth and fifth and so on. Life was typically presented as finite, but I suspected it wasn’t, that there might be a part, like our soul or spirit, that was infinite—and what if I was right? What if our journey wasn’t over when we died? How would that affect the way I lived, the decisions I made?
Rachel and I shared our own thoughts about life, love, death, and race. Everything I read and learned seemed to confirm the conclusions that I had reached and that go largely ignored: Yes, I was Black and Rachel was White, but only those who sought power and control saw that and no more. The poets and philosophers and seekers like us saw more. We quoted Gibran: “Beauty is not in the face; beauty is the light in the heart.” We were all the colors of life. The full spectrum of colors. All of us were.
Rachel and I took LSD one day and went to Jones Beach. There, as I walked around, I noticed thousands of flies clustered in a bush, buzzing, buzzing, buzzing, like a group of violinists all playing the same prolonged note. Mesmerized, I sat down next to the bush, got as close as I could, and I swear, I had an interesting exchange with the flies. The LSD helped, of course. I know it sounds crazy, but we had some kind of exchange in which these flies gorging on melted ice cream in a bush and I, a human being, shared some kind of consciousness, more of an awareness of each other, a respect for life.
It was beautiful, and whether it all took place in my head didn’t matter, because that was the deal, what was happening in my head and my heart. It was about the inner dialogue I was having with myself about life, death, love, and existence and its meaning, if there was any other way than to coexist with each other in harmony. Rachel understood.
She was a great teacher, introducing me to what I wanted to know and what I needed to know to move forward. I didn’t make the connection at the time, but I think the ideas she exposed me to were pieces of the puzzle of my life that went all the way back to the recurring dream I had as a little kid. If I was freed from fighting wars, how was I supposed to live?
I think Rachel was supposed to show me. All of us have guides; the trick is to recognize them and their significance, to be open to them, even with their faults. Rachel was not a perfect person. She had her own struggles. But useful information rarely comes from people without flaws. Who is that person without any problems or imperfections anyway? You learn the most from people who have overcome challenges, made mistakes, stumbled over their poor decisions and managed to get back up, wiser and smarter for it. They’re the ones who make you pause, think, question, and grow—and that sums up my relationship with Rachel.
Then one day I was ready to move on without her. I woke up and knew that after nine months together, we were finished; I had acquired whatever it was I was supposed to get from her (“Love one another, but make not a bond of love,” Gibran wrote, “let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls”). Thanks to this redheaded warrior, I had the sense that, at nearly thirty years old, I was just getting started.
I decided to become an Episcopalian. Without Rachel, I thought I wanted and needed a more formal spiritual discipline, and I thought anchoring myself to a religion was the way. I tried services at St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, but Catholicism was too severe for me. My sister was Episcopalian when she married, and I was comfortable at the Episcopalian diocese, Saint John’s the Divine on Amsterdam and 112th Street, a gorgeous nineteenth-century cathedral, so Episcopalian it was.
I announced to my family that I wanted to get confirmed. I was being ridiculous, but my family went along with me, which shows the depth of their love for me because I’m sure they also thought I was being ridiculous. They dressed up and sat in the front pew. I stood with others who were ready to deepen their commitment to the church and the Holy Spirit. But when my turn came to step in front of the bishop, I thought I recognized a look on his face that had been directed toward me many times before, and wondered, Does he like me?
All of a sudden, I had to get out of there, and quickly, before I burst out laughing. Without saying a word, I abruptly turned around and walked past my family, down the long aisle, and straight out the church door into daylight. My family wore puzzled expressions as they met me outside.
“What happened?” my mother asked.
“It’s just not for me,” I said.
My father flicked my ear with his fingers and shook his head. There was nothing more to say.
Some time passed. It was summer 1967, and I was living in a studio apartment on 56th Street and Ninth Avenue, breaking up with Cab Calloway’s daughter, Chris, and driving an Austin-Healey 3000 convertible sports car, which I bought after an incident that caused me to swear off public transportation. I was on the subway, offered my seat to an older woman, who, instead of saying thank you, cursed me out. That was the end of the subway for me. The Austin-Healy was much more my style, anyway.
I was in the Broadway show Hallelujah Baby!, a Tony Award–winning musical about the history of racism in America starring newcomer Leslie Uggams. I was working on the NBC daytime soap opera Another World when the play’s director asked me to substitute for Robert Hooks every Wednesday. It was the male lead; Robert had been nominated for a Tony Award. A week later, I was offered the job full-time after Robert left to make a movie.
Though described in The New York Times as “Civics One When Everyone in the World Has Got to Civics Six,” Hallelujah Baby! was a star-making tour de force for Leslie, whose character rises from maid to Hollywood star. My character ended up a civil rights leader. The creative team of Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne, Adolph Green, and Betty Comden had envisioned Lena Horne in the role, but when she passed, they reworked the play for Leslie, who charmed audiences and took home a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical. The play also won for Best Musical and Best Original Score.
With Leslie Uggams and Allen Case in the 1967 Broadway production of Hallelujah Baby!
Leslie and I knew each other from parties we had attended as kids. I was a little older than her, but we were well acquainted. Her mother adored me. On- and offstage, we teased and flirted with each other. Then one night she whispered a risqué joke to me while we were onstage. I responded immediately with an even naughtier suggestion, which I thought was funny but apparently crossed a line that she didn’t approve of, because Leslie told her husband, and I was fired after that night’s performance. The play closed shortly thereafter.
The blow was tempered by a new friendship with the writer James Baldwin. Jimmy and his brother, whom he referred to as “Lover,” had come to see Hallelujah Baby! After the show, the three of us went for drinks, and Jimmy and I got along as if we’d known each other for years. When he heard that I got fired, and more specifically what I had said to Leslie that got me fired, he howled with laughter and responded with something funnier—and dirtier.
His intellect was like a giant roller coaster. It drew you in, and then you just held on for a thrilling ride. But I had the privilege of knowing Jimmy Baldwin in a more personal way, as the private individual that he was, and when we were together, he didn’t present himself as an iconic figure, and I didn’t view him as such. We were simply friends. Around me, he let his guard down. There was no pressure to perform; in fact, the opposite was true—he let his true self come out, and what I saw time and again was a complex man who could be insecure, angry, hilarious, outrageous, vulnerable, questioning, curious, affectionate…real.
My beautiful, brilliant friend James Baldwin in the 1960s
But the private Jimmy was still extraordinary. I recall the first time I heard him refer to himself as an “ugly Black faggot.” His language was purposely raw, stated for effect, and, believe me, the look on my face let him see the desired effect, but he laughed and made it clear that he’d said it to get that reaction. I saw that language was his superpower, his ability to articulate with piercing and profound clarity. Words were his magic wand, used to entertain, captivate, hypnotize, shock, outrage, disarm, expose, persuade, and teach. Jimmy Baldwin was a force to be reckoned with.
The words his critics and haters used didn’t hurt him. He owned the worst that could be said of him and turned that into an even more powerful truth.
That was the thing about Jimmy. He was more man than any other man I had ever met. Even when he was sitting back with his drink and cigarette, he had both fists up, fighting for acceptance as a gay Black man and, above and beyond that, as a human being. He wanted the freedom to be who he was, to be human, which was his message to the world: Rise above the fight and the fire of oppression and afford everyone the dignity to be themselves.
I loved being around him. He was pure theater, a genius and a revolutionary, with a brilliant sense of humor and a clear, moral, and, for many, unsettling sense of right that continues to burn brighter than ever.
One afternoon I picked Jimmy up in my little Austin-Healey 3000 and took him to get a suit from the tailor where I had my suits custom-made. He’d just gotten an advance. My tailor, Roland Meledandri, had his shop on East 56th Street. Wood-paneled walls, beautiful Italian fabrics, discreet mirrors, and dressing rooms. Roland was a young man, but his shop was old-school. You didn’t just get a suit there. You got the treatment. You were fussed over. Treated like royalty. You spent hundreds but walked out feeling like you were wearing millions.
Jimmy loved Roland, and I loved watching Jimmy enjoy being measured and fitted for a new suit. He’d never had a suit made for him before, and he was fascinated by the process. He asked questions, noted every detail, and was one giant smile as he stood in front of the mirror while the tailor took his measurements. Roland told him about the fabric he brought back from Italy, his penchant for wide lapels, and the bold ties you couldn’t find anyplace else. It was for men who wanted to make a statement.
Jimmy was the ideal customer. He appreciated the full treatment he got in Roland’s shop, as did I, and by the time we left, the one suit we had come in to get him had turned into a couple of new suits for each of us.
I drove him back to his brother’s house. It was hot and humid, and as we got into Harlem I turned onto a street where a bunch of kids were spraying water at each other from open hydrants. My car was low to the ground and the top was down. To anyone with an iota of sophistication to their imaginations, Jimmy and I looked like two very haute secret agents in a hot sports car. To the kids on the street, we were targets.
“Turn around,” Jimmy insisted.
I laughed and said, “Don’t worry, they’re going to stop when we pass by.”
They didn’t. Jimmy was irate. I understood them. Kids were being kids. As far as he was concerned, though, they were disrespectful and breached his very clear line of right and wrong. “You just don’t do that,” he snapped, as only Jimmy could snap, before taking a breath and turning his face up toward the sun. “It’s not right, Billy.”
A short time after that, I met Jimmy and his brother in Paris. Jimmy had lived in France for nearly twenty years, setting up there in the late 1940s to escape what he felt was the suffocating racism and politics of the United States. He spoke fluent French, which impressed me; language was clearly his music. He said he could write only when he was in France. He’d written his first novel there, the classic Go Tell It on the Mountain, and never stopped.
I hadn’t been to Paris or anywhere abroad before, and he showed me around the city, recommending his favorite cafés, pointing out where he had met Josephine Baker and entertained Nina Simone, and telling me to just walk around and open myself to life.
It dawned on me why Jimmy had invited me to Paris. He was adapting The Autobiography of Malcolm X into a screenplay for Columbia Pictures, and he wanted me to play Malcolm. He had known Malcolm and had a clear vision for the way he wanted to tell the story. I was there as his muse. He never said that directly, but I was pretty sure that was the reason. He wanted my energy. He wanted to hear me read the lines he wrote. He wanted to hear and see his interpretation of Malcolm. We also had fun together. And we became good friends.
I remember telling him about the powerful effect that seeing Malcolm X interviewed on TV had on me several years earlier in Chicago. And I shared my thoughts about the civil rights movement, the marches and the protests. I was informed and opinionated, and I shared my thoughts with Jimmy. I also told him that I wasn’t an activist. I wasn’t someone who marched or made speeches.
“One time I went to a meeting at Columbia University that was about defusing the Nigerian-Biafran hostilities,” I said. “Everybody there wanted to be the boss, and there was too much arguing. It wasn’t for me.”
Ellington was the same way, I said. He understood the weight and harm of racism and sympathized with the fight against it, but he was pursuing his art, and he felt his way of expressing his feelings was through his music. I wasn’t someone who harbored militant ideologies or inclinations, but I saw the possibility of taking on roles in which I could bring those kinds of passions to the work—that is, if I got the work. I was focused on my career. I was an opportunist. My motives were selfish. But I am sure that Jimmy already understood this about me. He was using me for his own purposes. I was a conduit for his genius. He knew that I could recite his words and make others believe them, which was something he valued highly, and it was precisely the reason why I was in Paris.
That trip began a four-month odyssey that started in Paris but also included New York and Los Angeles. Jimmy wrote, and I read for him, and when he wasn’t working we went out and had a good time together. Still, this was a difficult, volatile time, and as I think about it, I don’t know how Jimmy got any writing done. He was constantly at odds with Columbia Pictures over the script. They wanted something commercial, a film about a martyred hero that would play in America’s suburbs, and Jimmy was writing a picture indicting White America as a racist country responsible for Malcolm’s death.
“I had no intention of betraying Malcolm, or his natives,” he wrote in The Devil Finds Work. As such, his clashes with the studio were epic and disturbing, ranging from the script being saddled with a co-writer to his insistence that I portray Malcolm. The studio set their sights on James Earl Jones, who was winning awards on Broadway for his portrayal of boxer Jack Johnson in The Great White Hope. However, Jimmy was adamant that Jones was not the right fit for Malcolm.
I vividly remember accompanying Jimmy to an in-person meeting with Columbia executives in Los Angeles. I waited for him in the commissary, and the moment I saw him walk in I sensed the meeting hadn’t gone well, and I was right. He recounted how someone had suggested Marlon Brando play Malcolm X, which left him absolutely outraged. I couldn’t believe it and laughed—from nerves, not because it was absurd, which it was. But Jimmy didn’t see any humor in it.
To make matters worse, someone in the meeting had even suggested darkening Brando’s skin to make him appear more like Malcolm. Even though a tiny part of me would have been interested in seeing what Brando could do with the part, the whole situation was utterly ridiculous and offensive to Jimmy.
He did not hide his anger. His voice filled the commissary. This was the James Baldwin who looked at the racism in our country and injustice in the world and didn’t just want to talk about it, he wanted to scream about it—and he was screaming!
I pleaded with him to calm down. “Jimmy, Jimmy,” I said. “Come on. I have to work with these people, and they don’t seem to like me much as it is.”
A few days later, Jimmy took me to a party at Brando’s house on Mulholland Drive. The two of them were friends. The irony was inescapable. We arrived, and I was sure everybody thought Jimmy and I were lovers. He had broached that possibility one day back in France, and when I declined, he understood and instead flew in a young friend of his from Morocco. Our friendship remained intact.
I was fine with people thinking whatever they wanted. It wasn’t like anyone cared at Brando’s. There were men and women of every color and ethnicity, and I got the impression that no matter what people were into privately, up there it was all about Brando. The rest of us were bit players to his whims. At one point, the party was interrupted when one of Brando’s employees ran into the large room where a bunch of us were gathered and informed Brando of a disturbance by the front gate. Details didn’t matter.
The great actor leaped up, grabbed a rifle from a nearby hiding place (maybe a closet, maybe under a sofa cushion), and led a posse of excited guests up the driveway. It was the funniest little army I had ever seen. Once he reached the gate, Brando surveyed the situation, declared it a false alarm, and led everyone back to the house. As theater, it was very entertaining. But this was real life, and in my opinion it was borderline insanity.
After things calmed down, I wandered into Brando’s library and was looking through books when he walked in. It was just the two of us, and his presence was so powerful it felt like the room tilted in his direction. His voice was charming and seductive. I sensed he wanted to have a little thing with me, or at least explore the possibility.
There wasn’t one. We talked about the Black Panthers instead. He was extremely well versed in the organization’s players and politics, and I sensed that he was a revolutionary at heart, someone who was driven to give voice to the voiceless and power to those without it. Like Jimmy, a fire burned inside him. Seeing that up close gave me new perspective and insight into his gifts as an actor.
Through Jimmy, I also met writer Gore Vidal. We went to his house on Outpost Drive in the Hollywood Hills for lunch one day, and the two of them were in fine form, skewering notable figures in politics and Hollywood and discussing books, including Gore’s scandalous new novel, the instant bestseller Myra Breckinridge, a send-up of the movie business told through the fictional diary of a transexual movie buff.
During lunch, wine flowed and there was much talk about old movies and movie stars, some naughty jokes, and much laughter. I admired the car he had in his driveway, a woody in mint condition. Gore said it had belonged to Clark Gable.
Afterward, I told Jimmy that I liked Gore much better than his East Coast literary nemesis, Norman Mailer, whom I’d met back in New York through Roscoe Lee Browne. I think he took that without comment as a given. In the spirit of name-dropping, I also mentioned that a friend of mine had once taken me to lunch with writer Christopher Isherwood and his partner, artist Don Bachardy, at their home in the Pacific Palisades.
Jimmy gave me a look, and I knew exactly what he was thinking. Yes, I had a lot of gay friends, and no, I wasn’t gay. He responded with a smile—that great Jimmy Baldwin smile that overtook his entire face and seemed to say, Okay, Billy, whatever you say. I was confident enough to find that amusing, too.
In the spring of 1968, Jimmy invited me to Palm Springs, where he had rented a house while he continued to work on the screenplay. He was still warring with the studio. I saw his frustration. Studio executives wanted a movie that would play in the suburbs. Jimmy was writing his truth, as he always did. On April 4, as we lounged by the pool, a reporter showed up and interviewed Jimmy about the movie.
After she left, we resumed our leisurely afternoon. Shortly after 4:00 p.m., Jimmy got a phone call. He had an extension by the pool. I heard him cry, “Oh no,” and I stopped dancing around the pool to listen. From the sound of his voice, I knew something bad, something tragic, had happened. My instincts were correct. A friend of Jimmy’s had told him that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had just been shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.
Later, in an essay for Esquire magazine, Jimmy wrote that he didn’t remember much of anything that followed the call. He wrote that I had comforted him. Like him, I can’t remember anything that came after the shock of the news, not the numbness I must’ve felt, not the way Jimmy must’ve relayed the news to me, or the tears we must’ve shared. Nor can I imagine what I might’ve said to Jimmy, though I do remember Jimmy telling me that he’d expected Martin would meet such a tragic end, the same as Malcolm.
A few years later, Jimmy published his screenplay as One Day When I Was Lost and said goodbye to the movie business. “I think I would rather be horsewhipped, or incarcerated in the forthright bedlam of Bellevue, than repeat the experience,” he wrote. Parts of his script were incorporated into Spike Lee’s 1992 movie, Malcolm X, though he was uncredited per the wishes of his estate.
The last time we saw each other was over lunch shortly after I had done Lady Sings the Blues. My career was building toward everything I wanted for it. I wasn’t a kid any longer, and I sensed we didn’t relate to each other any longer, the way we had in the past.
It was one of those things. We had been in the war together, and we were still friends. But our ships had sailed in different directions.