FRANK O’HARA
Felice Picano
A mid-season episode of the highly praised Home Box Office dramatic TV series Mad Men has its identity-challenged protagonist, Don Draper, reading a small book of poetry with a dark blue cover outlined in red, the 1964 City Lights first edition of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems. We first see it while he is at the desk in his office at the Manhattan advertising firm where he works, then later outside while he’s having lunch. Further into the episode it is prominent on his office coffee table and even on the commuter train as he’s headed home. It’s a clever way of placing the character and the episode at a specific point in time, and an even cleverer way of setting up Draper as a successful creative advertising director and as someone who is trying to be in-the-know.
The choice of Lunch Poems sets Draper up as an open-minded character, not quite an intellectual, but at least a man with some contact with and context of the avant-garde of his era. O’Hara’s book of poetry was the opposite of the accepted poets of his day, such as the confessional and anguished poems produced by likes of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Instead, O’Hara’s poems were fun, amusing, citified, arty, casual, urbanely referencing singers, painters, and even brand names that everyone did or should have known. At all times, his book was intimate and confiding, letting the reader into the poet’s emotional and daily life, not recollected in tranquility but with wry amusement between sandwiches and martinis. It was the definition of that Playboy-era’s highest compliment: cool! So it was no surprise that when Don Draper was divorced the following TV season, he moved to the West Village.
In the mid-1960s after finishing college and a few months in Europe, I moved west myself to the Village, from Manhattan’s Alphabet City, where I’d previously lived. At twenty-one, I was on my own in Greenwich Village, already a legendary Bohemia, in a third floor studio apartment at 51 Jane Street.
My second day in the Village was a perfect autumn one in New York: sunny, with high clouds, breezy and so clear I swore I could make out the Hudson River, several blocks west. After lunch, I took a long walk around my new neighborhood, and two blocks from where I’d moved I met a tall, blond curly-haired, handsomely outgoing young man who told me his name was J.J. Mitchell.
As we were talking, he angled me into a doorway on an otherwise empty street and began assiduously necking and fondling me, which I found both surprising and welcoming. Satisfied with what he’d discovered, my new acquaintance walked us over to the large glass and travertine lobby of a building at Jane Street and Eighth Avenue known as The Rembrandt. We necked more in the elevator, outside an apartment door, and then we were suddenly inside an apartment where a cocktail party was in progress. Men were jammed into a large room and an attached kitchen. Everyone held a cocktail and everyone was talking at once as loud as they could and laughing.
J.J. vanished and reappeared with cocktails for both of us. He then edged me over to another doorway, urging me to drink up. I thought this was odd, but okay: I’m willing to do this, if he is.
I was maneuvered through the door and into a darkened room and spun around. Another man was sitting on the bed and, as J.J. continued kissing me, the man unzipped my fly, took out my genitals and began to …. Well, you can guess what happened next. This was even more of a surprise, but I was nothing if not game, even if I was a bit perplexed. I was even more puzzled when J.J. vanished from the room, while my new friend held onto me tightly. I was young and horny and he was demonstrating an admirable and accomplished skill, so let’s just say that we completed what we’d begun with the usual result.
Afterward, my newer friend handed me my cocktail glass, stood up and said, “I need another. Thank you.” He herded me toward the door and led me back into the party, adding, “Stay as long as you like. There are all kinds of interesting characters here.”
I had to have looked as stunned as I was by this odd turn of events, but before I could decide what to do—I was trying to find what happened to J.J. He seemed to have left—someone came over to me who I knew, a French airline steward named Ulysses, another tall, handsome blond with curly if thinning hair. He immediately kissed me on both cheeks and began speaking in Frenglish, the speech that he and his other pals usually affected in America. Ulysses said that our mutual friend, Noel de Bailhac, had stepped out with someone to get more ice. Noel and I had met at the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park the previous year and we’d casually slept together whenever he was on layover from Air France, where he also worked as a steward. Noel was a pretty man with a great body and lots of fun in and out of bed. In seconds, Noel and Ulysses’ boyfriend were back with bags of ice, and I spent the remainder of the party in their ambit until we left to go around the corner to Greenwich Street to a little boite they knew, for dinner.
At one point, the man who had blown me also came into the café, along with J.J. and a few other middle-aged men. They were seated way in the back where they continued to laugh and chat and drink cocktails as everyone had done at the flat. Noel told me that he was our host for the cocktail party. He was revealed to be a bit below medium height, not yet forty years old, preppily dressed, with receding brown hair, a patrician face, sleepy eyes, and a great, almost Greek-statue profile. Noel said he was Frank O’Hara, a poet. Ulysses knew J.J., who was our age, from before; J.J. had stumbled across my French pals earlier that day in Sheridan Square and invited them to the party. Noel thought the other men with Frank and J.J. were painters.
Two days later, I was walking along Jane Street headed toward the Seventh Avenue subway when I passed Frank walking toward his building. He stopped me and said, “We’re having a big party at Indiana’s loft downtown Saturday.” He pulled out a piece of paper and a pen and leaned against my shoulder and began writing down the address, saying. “I already mentioned you to Robert and he wants to meet you.” Huh? What? Done, he handed it to me and I read the Bowery address. By then, Frank was already halfway down the block, yelling “Bring some of those other cute guys you know.”
Noel and Ulysses were both flying that weekend, so I grabbed David Jackson, who I always thought was all-American handsome, and despite our misgivings about the Bowery space—“Won’t there be winos and bums all over?” he asked fearful—we went. The space we entered was ten times the size of O’Hara’s flat and it was jammed with people. We didn’t see Frank anywhere in the crowd. David and I were about to leave after having had a few drinks and figuring out that we knew no one there when Frank showed up with a striking looking man his own age, but bigger, more solidly built, and really quite dashing in his black cowboy vest, open work shirt, and tight jeans. That was Robert.
David and I met seven other guys that early evening who asked for our phone numbers and over the next year we were invited to various parties, a gallery opening, and even to Bridgehampton for a weekend. In later years, people asked why I wasn’t still hanging around with those folks. I explained it thusly—“At Southampton we would arrive for dinner at eight and have cocktails. At eleven thirty we were still having cocktails when I heard that someone had begun cooking dinner. At eleven forty two, they were still having cocktails but I was dead asleep.”
At the time I wasn’t aware of it, but I had also met other writers at these parties. In years to come James Schuyler, John Ashbery, Richard Howard, and others told me that they’d first seen or met me during my Year of the Painters.
Then came the awful news of O’Hara’s death by taxi-cab on the beach at Fire Island. Me and my social worker pals used to take those taxis every Saturday from our Ocean Beach rental to the Grove to go dancing. Who knew they were so dangerous?
Of course by then I’d read the Lunch Poems, and O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency. I was sorry I’d not gotten to know O’Hara better. But often I wondered if I ever could have—really. Because while only a decade apart, Frank’s Gay New York was so fundamentally different from mine: they drank, we drugged; they had cocktail parties, we went out dancing; they had complicated affairs and adulteries, we had orgies; they had scandals, we had be-ins. In the later ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, through Edmund White’s older friends, I was able to get to know a little better and thus to appreciate more Manhattan’s gay generation before mine: I still can quote Schuyler and Merrill poems. But even so it was a foreign land: a land where Lunch Poems was the passport, the guide, and the dessert all at once.
So, you can imagine my surprise when Craig Cotter’s After Lunch arrived by mail. I’m not sure who connected us up, but when we met after that, I already understood that I was encountering the biggest Frank O’Hara fan who ever existed. Hell, it turned out that Craig had even read the lousy poets that Frank had drunk cocktails with; that’s how big a fan he was.
This new book of poems was for me an absorption and distillation of what Frank had been, wanted to be, and had written about—but decades later, set in Los Angeles’s own quite different urbanity, and by a basketball playing, Beatles-addict from Michigan.
Dude! Seriously!
Oh, and Craig Cotter is also a good poet.
Enjoy.
Felice Picano