If there was a moment when crucial life decisions were made for me so starkly that at the time, I said, “I can’t believe this is happening,” it was one Thursday afternoon at Fire Island Pines in early July some four and a half decades ago.
An ordinary day, or so I thought. I’d just been to the Pines harbor’s little commercial center and picked up my mail, delivered by ferry six days a week, as I often did. I was opening up a letter from a woman friend of mine who worked in publishing, and I was shaking out its contents. There I found an early copy of the New York Times Books of the Times Sunday section bent open to the penultimate pages where circled in red was my novel Eyes, high on the paperback best seller list. At that very moment, the young man who I’d been seeing for half a year in Manhattan but more often at the Pines, found me on the boardwalk and sidled us into a more private lane. He was very agitated and he said, “I’ve made a decision. It has to do with me, my strengths, and mostly my weaknesses, and I’m returning to Larry.” Larry being the man he’d been living with for a few years and from whom he’d taken a “break” with me. “I can’t explain it more now,” he added. “But I was up all night and I didn’t make this decision lightly.” He then sped off.
So, there I stood on Fire Island Boulevard at noon, with a list in my hand containing my first best-selling book and a sudden broken relationship with someone I really cared for and I thought: “I can’t believe this is happening. Who is writing this novel, anyway?”
I bring this incident up because if something that ridiculously black and white, and so tackily early 20th Century in theme – love versus career – can happen in my life, then surely a lot of what I write about that some might call coincidental or even “way out in left field” is justifiable. Which brings us to my novel The Book of Lies.
The idea for the book came about several years after four of the members of the Violet Quill Club had died of HIV related diseases: Michael Grumley, followed in a few months by his husband, Robert Ferro, followed a few months later by George Whitmore, who was followed later that same year by Christopher Cox. With each of them I had had some kind of important, mostly unsexual, relationship. I was the only one of the VQ to continue seeing Cox, after he and Edmund White broke up, for example. Cox worked as an editor at Ballantine Books under my wonderful former editor from Delacorte, Linda Grey. He and I had lunch every few months uptown. He visited me at Fire Island Pines, and I regularly visited and helped him when he was dying of Pancreatic Cancer at St. Vincent’s Hospital, where I fielded the regular phone calls from his old friend Susan Sarandon, who was stuck in South America making a movie and who helped Cox financially and in other ways in those last days.
But the incident that actually turned me toward the book was one that’s not even in the book and which you are hearing about for the first time. One Hallowe’en evening in the early 1980s I got a call from Robert asking if I was around for dinner out that night and/or if I had plans for later on. I said I’d join them for dinner, and said, I’d thought of going down to Christopher Street to see the post-official-parade gay parade there. Robert & Michael drove in from Gaywyck Sur Mer in Sea Girt, New Jersey and we had dinner at OhHoSos in Soho and then Robert drove us near Christopher Street. It was quite cold out that night, and all three of us were appropriately dressed in jeans, sweaters, leather boots with leather bomber jackets. Robert casually went to the back trunk of his Pontiac Firebird, opened it, and pulled out three Marilyn Monroe wigs. He plopped them on our heads, where they served to warm us like hats, so with wigs and dark glasses on, we three strode into the mass of mostly gay guys in costumes and soon were meeting and greeting friends. I almost immediately ceased to think about the wigs and myself in the wig, until we stopped at the Häagen-Daaz shop open to the street and we ordered sundaes. Suddenly I saw us in the mirror and burst out laughing. But before I could do any more than that, playwright Doric Wilson who I’d published, appeared and we were socializing again. Maybe two hours later, as the mass of folks began to thin, we left, returned to the car, where Robert took the wigs off us and put them in the trunk of the car to return to a shop the next day. They dropped me off at my place on 11th Street and drove up to their flat on West 95th.
All of it completely casual. I remember recalling it and thinking, “that’s how we were: nuts, but casual about being nuts.” Creative, but soigné about our creativity. That was the ambience I wanted to recreate in the novel. And I feel that I successfully achieved that.
Of course, there were so many red herrings in the book to keep anyone from seeing that. To begin with, it’s a mystery story. That came about because ever since my 1979 novel, The Lure, was published to controversy and acclaim, people had been asking for a sequel. Obviously, no sequel is likely. But by being an academic mystery, a true whodunit, The Book of Lies, satisfied me (if no one else) that I had written a sequel to The Lure. But of course, it is a double mystery, because the book’s narrator is hiding an important fact himself. So, while the reader may think s/he may have the answer to the overt mystery, s/he will surely be caught out by the shock of the second one. Partly, I was having fun. Quoting noir and thriller movies like mad, and no one caught on! That first drive through Laurel Canyon with another car right on our narrator’s car’s tail comes from Doris Day’s perilous nighttime drive through – you guessed it – rain-soaked Laurel Canyon with the body of the husband she has just killed in the trunk of the car in the film, Midnight Lace. Our narrator’s entry to Van Slyke’s house where he is to stay while the author is out of town, echoes Phillip Marlowe’s visit to the Hancock Park mansion where he meets the femme fatale of Farewell, My Lovely. Etc. etc.
Then there was the problematic case of there being “too many authors” in The Book of Lies. If it really was about the Violet Quill club – which it sometimes pretended to be and sometimes didn’t – then how come instead of seven authors, there were nine?! Especially in the UK, where the book was first published and I believe better appreciated, readers and even a few scholars went out of their way to compare the “American Bloomsburys” – as we in the VQ are called there – to the writers in the book. There were clever comparisons, intertextual analyses, because sly me, I provided individual pieces of each fictional authors’ writings. They ate up the Post-Modern aspects of the book, but no one ever figured out who on earth the other two were.
So – spoiler alert – I’ll tell you now. Not that you would ever put two and to together, because one of the nine was a not very well known – i.e. very moderately known – mystery author and dear friend of mine in Greenwich Village, Joseph Matheson.* And the second was totally unknown, a writer manqué, sometimes boyfriend, and sometimes just a weekend dance partner of mine, Ray Ford, who looked like a Leyendecker Arrow Shirt ad from the 1920’s and who I adored. Joe and Ray got into the book because I staunchly believed that they were cheated out of being successful authors during their lifetimes. By the time I was writing the novel, both had died. So, this was my way of correcting that essentially stupid bad writer (see paragraphs 2 & 3) Fate, and giving a little of the success from my own life – which I’d never asked for and got anyway – to two wonderful guys who really did desire it and who never got it, but instead got fatal illnesses and unfortunate ends.
One critic called the book “disingenuous,” to which I did and will continue to reply, “It’s titled The Book of Lies! Not the Book of Truths or Almost Truths. So, of course, it’s disingenuous.” I hope you enjoyed being lied to. I enjoyed doing it.
— Felice Picano
West Hollywood, April 2020
*The Love Tribe (1968), Alicia’s Trump (1980) Death Turns Right (1982) Under the Sign of the Virgin (1983)