For purveyors of the moral status quo, the first four weeks of 1968 emerged as an unqualified disaster.
In January alone, Off-Broadway performances began for Mart Crowley’s play The Boys in the Band, about an expletive-laden, gay birthday party gone bad. Terry Southern fulfilled his fantasy, and then his nightmare, of seeing his long-banned Candy finally go before the movie cameras. Jane Fonda, still filming Barbarella in Rome, fretted over the film’s outer-space striptease, which director-husband-svengali Roger Vadim had promised to fix in postproduction by hiding her privates with the film’s opening credits. Kenneth Tynan went from theater critic to theater impresario, asking everyone from Samuel Beckett to Jules Feiffer to contribute skits for his new erotic stage revue, Oh! Calcutta! Director Lindsay Anderson began filming If . . . , set in an English boys’ school rife with anarchy, homosexual love, and a heterosexual wrestling match. United Artists green-lit John Schlesinger’s exploration of the Forty-Second Street hustler scene, Midnight Cowboy. Director Tom O’Horgan toyed with adding a nude scene to his upcoming Broadway incarnation of the new musical Hair. Little, Brown published Gore Vidal’s novel about a transsexual, Myra Breckinridge, while over at Knopf, Inc., they began printing the first seventy thousand copies of John Updike’s tome on suburban spouse-swapping, Couples. And Lance Loud, only a few years away from being TV’s first gay star, was so inspired by seeing Warhol’s Chelsea Girls that he promptly dyed his hair silver to match his idol’s wig.
In 1968, the world did not yet know of the teenager from Santa Barbara, but Lance Loud was already well on his way to being the Zelig of the Sexplosion years as he filtered and absorbed the rapid changes in pop culture, not to make art but to turn his life into art. All he needed was a little help from some documentary filmmakers, the yet-to-be-launched Public Broadcasting Service, and, of course, Andy Warhol himself.
That January, Warhol continued to challenge the sexual status quo, but not from his Factory. He left Manhattan to visit Oracle, Arizona, where he was making a new film, a Western, which was of such concern to the men of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI that they decided to open a file on him. Almost overnight, Chelsea Girls (the title lost its original “the” on its way up from the underground) had turned Warhol into a target, the bureau’s need to rout out revolutionaries no longer limited to just communists.
Warhol’s go-to movie-guy Paul Morrissey doubted that he could ever top those Chelsea Girls reviews in Newsweek (“fleshpots of Caligula’s Rome!”) and Time (“a sewer!”) with this new, as yet untitled movie. And there were other challenges. If three thousand dollars and a four-day shooting schedule were good enough for Chelsea Girls, Warhol thought it would be good enough for the half dozen or so subsequent films that Morrissey was to make, including this new Western that updated Shakespeare’s tale of two star-crossed lovers. “I had this idea of doing Romeo and Juliet with groups of cowboys and cowgirls,” Morrissey explained. “But no girls came because they had a quarrel with Viva.”
Viva, aka Janet Susan Mary Hoffmann, took her name from Viva paper towels. And there were other reasons she morphed into the number-one superstar in the Factory firmament after Warhol fashion icon Edie Sedgwick demanded and got herself removed from Chelsea Girls. In addition to her Garbo-esque beauty, which included none of the great Swede’s discretion or fear of exposure, Viva knew how to get attention in a room, if not a movie, full of flamboyant male homosexuals. As she explained it in her lazy soprano whine, “Take off your clothes!”
She was also one of the first Warhol actors to be called a superstar. “They felt they were doing something special with those movies,” said Joe Dallesandro, who started at the Factory as a doorman and later graduated to appearing before Warhol’s camera, usually stark naked to the delight of everyone except himself. “How can you be doing something special in three or four days?” he asked.
Since a Western, even an Andy Warhol Western, couldn’t be shot in New York City, the movie Morrissey envisioned, about a cowboy Romeo and his cowgirl Juliet, needed the appropriate locale. Morrissey chose Oracle, Arizona, where a few John Wayne pictures had been shot. The citizens of Oracle liked the Duke. They didn’t like Warhol or Morrissey. After all, in what other Western did a woman ride into town with her nurse—her male nurse!—and end up being raped by a few bored cowboys who’d much prefer bedding a handsome male drifter?
Viva put it more succinctly. “The story is I run a whorehouse outside of town,” she said.
Warhol wanted to call it Fuck, then he considered The Glory of the Fuck, but ultimately settled on the more atmospheric, less graphic Lonesome Cowboys.
On the first day of shooting in Oracle, Viva showed up in a very proper English riding habit, complete with a stock and black leather boots. She’d picked the outfit herself, explaining, “I just woke up from a bad LSD trip and I think I’m in Virginia with Jackie Kennedy.” As it turned out, she needed the stock, being the only woman in the company, which turned out not to be quite as one hundred percent gay as she had hoped. “We were staying together at this guest ranch and it just went on all night. Every night I’d change rooms and every night they’d all be in there with me,” she complained to Andy Warhol.
It concerned Andy, especially what was happening off-camera between his leading lady and the film’s cowboy Romeo, an actor named Tom Hompertz. “Stay away from Tom, save it for the movie!” he kept telling Viva.
Viva claimed she was being attacked by other men on the set. “I was just raped again,” she told Andy on morning two of what was only a four-day shoot.
As with every scene in a Paul Morrissey–directed movie, the actors made it up as they went along. Like the scene where five of them rush Viva as she gets off her horse and everybody screams, “Fuck her! Fuck her!” and proceed to tear off her clothes and then mount her.
It was this scene that compelled one resident of Oracle to lodge a complaint with the FBI, which promptly sent an agent or two out west. “There were planes overhead,” Joe Dallesandro said of the shoot. “That was pretty funny.”
The FBI opened a file on Andy Warhol, created under the category “ITOM: Interstate Transportation of Obscene Matter,” and in his report an agent didn’t stint on the details. As he recorded it, “All of the males in the cast displayed homosexual tendencies and conducted themselves toward one another in an effeminate manner. . . .
“One of the cowboys practiced his ballet and a conversation ensued regarding the misuse of mascara by one of the other cowboys. . . .
“There was no plot to the film and no development of character throughout. It was rather a remotely-connected series of scenes which depicted situations of sexual relationships of homosexual and heterosexual nature.”
Luckily for Warhol and company, Lonesome Cowboys had long wrapped by the time the FBI report made its way back to Washington, D.C.
IF THE FBI CAME lately to the work of Andy Warhol, J. Edgar Hoover’s men had already opened and closed its file on Terry Southern when his novel Candy (written ten years earlier with limited input from the drug-addled Mason Hoffenberg) went into production as a movie that January at the Incom Studios in Rome.
The bureau had opened its Southern investigation in February 1965. Only the year before, G. P. Putnam’s had made Southern’s “dirty book,” about an adventurously promiscuous American girl, legally available in the United States, where it quickly rose to the top of the bestseller lists despite having already sold over twelve million contraband copies under both its original title and Lollipop. The novel got a boost stateside when Publishers Weekly labeled it “sick sex.”
After Candy’s initial publication in France, Southern had gone on to write the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and been nominated for an Oscar. The FBI, however, didn’t care about awards not won. Its file labeled him a “pornographer,” and Candy, in the bureau’s estimation, was the least of it:
“With reference to [Southern’s] pornographic library of films . . . it is not known to this office whether it is a local violation in Connecticut to display films to ‘guests’ and it is therefore left to the discretion of the bureau as to whether such information should be made available, strictly on a confidential basis, to a local law enforcement agency covering Southern’s place of residence.”
Regarding the novel Candy, the FBI’s internal review found it “not a suitable vehicle for prosecution.” As the file concluded, “ ‘Candy,’ for all its sexual descriptions and foul language, is primarily a satirical parody of the pornographic books which currently flood our newsstands. Whatever erotic impact or prurient appeal it has is thoroughly diluted by the utter absurdity and improbability of the situations described.”
The makers of the Candy movie weren’t quite as liberal as the FBI. They flat out rejected Southern’s script for its sin of inclusion regarding the book’s infamous hunchback character, who performs an unusual sex act at the heroine’s insistence. As it was described in the novel, “The hunchback hesitated, and then lunged headlong toward her, burying his hump between Candy’s legs as she hunched wildly, pulling open her little labias in an absurd effort to get it in her. ‘Your hump! Your hump!’ she kept crying, scratching and clawing at it now.”
In fact, the hunchback pages of Candy (“Give me your hump!”) were second only to the novel’s closing incest scene (“Good Grief—It’s Daddy!”) as required late-night reading at better frat houses everywhere.
Southern just couldn’t bear to lose the hunchback in the movie version. “These scenes were very dear to Terry’s heart because it was the first he wrote for the book,” noted his longtime partner, Gail Gerber. “Holding firm and refusing to delete them from the screenplay, he was fired and lost control over his property.”
The Texas-born Southern, who had been described as having all the charm of a walking hangover, put the controversy a bit more delicately. “I have nothing to do with it,” he said of the movie, “having withdrawn when they insisted on taking out the hunchback.”
Worse than their deleting the hunchback was their hiring director Christian Marquand, who’d never directed a movie before and whose major qualification for the job had something to do with his helping good friend Marlon Brando buy the French Polynesian atoll of Tetiaroa. Brando was nothing if not loyal, and through his efforts Marquand not only landed the Candy gig but was able to hire, at fifty thousand dollars a week per star, other high-profile actors, including Walter Matthau, James Coburn, Ringo Starr, and Richard Burton, who never quite forgave Brando the indignity that was to be Candy, the movie.
“We were all kind of gathered around the idea of doing a 1960s movie,” said Coburn, who played Dr. Krankheit. “Our attitude was ‘Let’s see if we can do it.’ Nudity was beginning to come in, fucking on-screen, and it was all much freer.”
Buck Henry wrote the screenplay—or, more aptly, was in the process of writing it as the production progressed. Southern kept calling him that “sit-com writer,” referring to Henry’s Get Smart days, unaware that Henry had also recently enjoyed a fair degree of success with his screenplay for The Graduate.
Henry returned the insult by saying that the direction of his screenplay would be “every one conceivable away from the book.”
When Coburn’s week of work on the film approached that January, he flew to Rome, only to be met at the airport by the film’s novice director. “Well, there’s been a little problem,” Marquand informed him. “We’ll probably have to close down for a week, or at least until we can do some shooting that Ewa isn’t in.”
Ewa was Ewa Aulin, an unknown Scandinavian actress who’d been cast as the all-American girl Candy. Her accent didn’t matter, Marquand insisted. She would be dubbed.
As Coburn and Marquand spoke on the tarmac, Ewa Aulin was no longer in Rome, having undergone what was politely being called a “rest cure,” which had something to with her being put “to sleep out in a little resort town on the coast, Taormina.”
Aulin had trouble playing her scenes opposite Marlon Brando, cast as the Great Guru Grindl, who, outfitted in Indian robes and long black wig, seduces Candy in a big semi-truck that doubles as his meditation room as he roams America. Brando couldn’t stop wanting to have sex with Aulin, and Aulin couldn’t stop laughing at Brando.
“She had a wonderful ass, man, and Marlon just couldn’t resist,” said Coburn. “He’d started coming on to her pretty strong, turning on his great charm, even during their scenes together. . . . She would look at him in this fright wig, and just get hysterical. He was so funny and ingratiating to begin with—only now he wanted to fuck her, so that was the icing on the cake. It was overwhelming. She just went over the edge.”
Stuck away in a hotel in Taormina, Aulin was given injections to keep her sedated until she ceased giggling. “Soon, rumors reached Hollywood that the decadent production had kept Aulin high just for the fun of it,” reported Southern’s son, Nile.
No one knew how the movie—or, for that matter, the production—would end. “We’re keeping it a secret,” said Buck Henry.
Brando described the ensuing chaos more graphically. “This movie makes as much sense as a rat fucking a grapefruit,” he said.
IT WAS NOT GORE VIDAL’S intention to top Terry Southern or Andy Warhol, who was less than a year away from bringing transsexuals, in Flesh and then Trash, to America’s movie theaters. In fact, Vidal’s impetus, if not his inspiration, for creating the trannie character Myra Breckinridge came from the other side of the sexual divide. At that moment in time, the strictly heterosexual Kenneth Tynan was conceiving his own carnal entertainment, one that was to be militant in its exclusion of homosexuality, if not all things sexually adventurous.
Vidal, flush from the Broadway success of his political drama The Best Man, was not averse to currying the favor of London’s most famous theater critic, which Tynan arguably was before leaving his post at the Observer to become literary manager of Sir Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre. Those two lofty posts, first at the Observer and then the National, helped to propel Vidal’s generosity when it came to his caustic theater friend. Vidal lent Tynan one thousand British pounds shortly after the critic remarried and found himself financially strapped due to exorbitant alimony payments to the first Mrs. Tynan, writer Elaine Dundy, who confessed that she had once been “madly in love” with Vidal.
In their literary circle, Vidal was well-known for being bisexual and Tynan was equally well-known for being a philanderer. And not just any old philanderer, as his ex-wife explained when giving the reason for their divorce. “To cane a woman on her bare buttocks, to hurt and humiliate her, was what gave him his greatest sexual satisfaction,” Dundy recalled with her usual novelistic precision. Perhaps more injurious to their union was Tynan’s severe double standard when it came to Dundy’s replication of his chronic infidelity—like the time he returned home to find a naked man in the kitchen with Dundy, and promptly threw the man’s clothes down the elevator shaft.
If Vidal had any objections to Tynan’s conduct, it would have been that his critic friend had gotten married—and not once but twice. Vidal strenuously objected to the institution of marriage—and not because it excluded homosexuals. He credited his own lifelong partnership with Howard Austen to the fact that the two men never had sex a second time after their first meeting in a New York City bathhouse in 1950. An ardent believer in quick, anonymous sex—and the more the better, regardless of the cost—Vidal had a thing for whores. “I love prostitution,” he once said. “I think it’s just absolutely the greatest institution there is and it’s the most honest.”
Their reputations for being libertines—or at least indulging in a lot of sex—made Vidal a natural contributor to Tynan’s new theater endeavor.
Like so many critics, Tynan didn’t write plays. He wrote about plays. If he could have written plays, he would have. But since he couldn’t, he didn’t, and instead he asked several other writers to write his play for him. What Tynan had in mind wasn’t a play at all but a revue, each element of which would carry a sex theme. Since Vidal was one of the first writers he approached, Tynan was a bit vague on the concept. “If you have any comment to make on the erotic relationship between men and women, write it down. It can be a skit, a song,” he offered.
That Tynan was to go public with his sexual obsession came as no surprise to Vidal. First off, Tynan needed the money. And second, Tynan had long been a major foe of censorship in any form, and in recent months was no longer best known for his reviews or his job at the National Theatre but rather for being the first man to utter the word “fuck” on TV. It happened on November 13, 1965, on a late-night live show, BBC-3. The on-air commentator had wondered if censorship should be abolished and if Tynan, as literary manager of the National Theatre, could conceivably see producing a play in which a couple had sexual intercourse onstage. “Oh I think so, certainly,” Tynan replied without hesitation, except for, perhaps, the pauses caused by his incessant stutter. “I doubt if there are very many rational people in this world to whom the word ‘fuck’ is particularly diabolical or revolting or totally forbidden.”
In time, the hard-driving, chain-smoking, sadomasochistic Tynan would regret the “fuck” remark. “So that’s my obit? This is what I’m going to be remembered for, having said ‘fuck’ on television?” he used to complain—that is, until his sex revue, Oh! Calcutta!, became as familiar a title as Hello, Dolly! or Mary Poppins.
Back in the late 1960s, Tynan’s show didn’t have a name. It was just an idea, and not a very specific one as Tynan further explained it to Vidal for the first time.
“It’s to be an erotic evening with no purpose except to titillate, arouse, and provoke,” he said. The whole thing, Tynan believed, would be “very elegant and perverse, every heterosexual fetish fully catered for. And no crap about art.”
Well, maybe just a little crap. Tynan did stress that no less an estimable talent than playwright Harold Pinter, author of The Birthday Party, would be “co-devising and co-directing” his erotic show. And thanks to the connections of his London-based producer, Michael White, he’d been able to secure a promise from Samuel Beckett that he’d write something for the show. (White recalled meeting the absurdist playwright at a pub near the Royal Court Theatre in London. “He knew I was a fan, in absolute awe of him,” said the producer. “I’d been at the world premiere of Waiting for Godot in Paris in 1953.”) Other famous names were also bandied about to provide the skits: Tennessee Williams, Edna O’Brien, Jules Feiffer—impressive, prestigious writers.
Vidal was intrigued, and in the correspondence that followed Tynan offered one vague sex scenario to his writer-friend-lender, now living in Rome. In a letter, Tynan suggested that Vidal write “a sketch on the organization of an orgy.” Back in London, Tynan was already having a good time of it, collecting ideas for skits from a number of celebrities who came to his flat to drink, carouse and fantasize. John Lennon offered one inspired bit. “You know the idea,” the soon-to-be ex-Beatle began, “four fellows wanking, giving each other images—descriptions—it should be ad-libbed anyway. They should even really wank, which would be great.”
Perhaps that wasn’t the kind of orgy Tynan had in mind when he suggested a skit about group sex to Vidal. He made it clear to other potential participants that only “non-queers” would be involved in the production of his sex revue. Fantasies and fetishes of every stripe would be depicted, with only one caveat: no homosexuality. “There’s been enough of that around,” he told more than one invitee to the project. He saw the show as an aphrodisiac, a “gentle stimulation, where a fellow can take a girl he is trying to woo.”
If Tynan didn’t yet have a title for his show, he did have a poster or, at least, an image: a Turkish harem odalisque, painted by Clovis Trouille in 1946. The buttocks-fixated Tynan had admired the painting for years, thought it symbolized what he wanted his revue to be, and he even liked how the painting’s title, O quel cul t’as!, translated to “What an arse you have!” That’s what Tynan would call his show, Oh! Calcutta!
If Vidal was offended by the general hetero ambiance of Tynan’s project, he kept it to himself. Besides, he had something else in mind—something playful, ironic, and perverse in a way that would severely tweak a militant heterosexual like Tynan. In the late 1960s, the story of a transsexual didn’t qualify as gay so much as outrageous. “Generally, [Tynan] wanted something far out,” said Vidal. “Myra’d do business for spanking. After all, if she was just dildo wielding . . . ,” it didn’t give him much room to add many participants to Tynan’s imagined orgy.
Vidal toyed with writing a skit for Tynan, then came to his creative, as well as his commercial, senses.
As with most of Vidal’s fictional works, “I seldom start with any more than a sentence that has taken possession of me,” the author revealed. In this case, that sentence was “I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man may possess; clad only in garter belt and one dress shield.”
That’s all Vidal needed. A sentence grew into a paragraph, a paragraph into a chapter, a chapter into a book. He didn’t know where his novel was going, but Vidal envisioned something far greater than a ten-minute sex skit. “I hadn’t even made up my mind about the sex-change at that point. I heard this voice in my head. Absolutely like Joan of Arc, telling me to liberate my native land.”
And so Vidal discarded his Oh! Calcutta! assignment, since his “native land” never included Tynan’s projected audience of tired businessmen in need of wooing instructions.
Somewhere in that evolution between paragraph and first chapter, Vidal decided to keep Myra for himself. “It got more interesting,” he said of his newest project, “and I certainly wasn’t going to waste it on a review-sketch.”
Vidal “vividly” recalled the day that he began writing the novel Myra Breckinridge in earnest, when that first sentence had already bloomed into a few untidy paragraphs. He and Howard Austen were in the process of fixing up their new flat in Rome. “I had a pile of lined yellow legal pads on my writing table, which was opposite my bed,” Vidal recalled. Across from the table, a French door opened onto the terrace that overlooked the Largo Argentina—“a great square with several Roman temples beneath the pavement’s level, as well as a large colony of cats.” There was a new moon. It had just risen over the Vatican to the west of the apartment, a sign for him of good luck. “The moon, not the Vatican,” he noted.
When he wrote his historical novels Julian and Washington, D.C., Vidal indulged in a great deal of note-taking from the necessary records. With what he called “an entirely invented book like Myra,” he simply let that first sentence “I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man may possess . . .” take possession of his imagination.
Two weeks into the project, it occurred to Vidal: “Myra had been a male film critic who had changed his sex.” He laughed. He continued writing. Furiously. Then Christopher Isherwood came to visit. The author of The Berlin Stories, which became the play I Am a Camera, which became the stage musical Cabaret, had recently toured India with his lover, Don Bachardy, thirty-two years his junior; and back on terra Italiano, Isherwood wondered aloud to Vidal if the teeming peoples of color would eventually wipe out their “fragile white race.” Then they shared another vodka tonic to mull over the ensuing genocide.
Vidal and Isherwood shared the same ironic, if not downright camp, attitude toward sex that allowed them to find amusement in everything from the coming apocalypse to the eminent demise of Caucasians. Isherwood devised a plan for the latter: “But we must set aside reservations for the better-looking blonds, the Danes and such,” he pontificated. “They must be preserved like rare unicorns. Certainly, the Indians will enjoy them in their reservations along with all that snow we’ll shovel in to provide the right Arctic touch.”
Isherwood’s detachment, along with the vodka, put his writer-friend in the proper mood. Vidal also thought of Norman Mailer as he continued writing his new novel. He had once told the author of The Naked and the Dead that he put too many orgasms in his novels. Mailer, in turn, faulted Vidal for being cold and clinical about sex. “So I stuffed it with cold, clinical sex,” Vidal said of Myra Breckinridge, in which his transsexual heroine buckles on a dildo in order to rape a recalcitrant young actor-pupil whom she/he is mentoring. Otherwise, “Myra sprang out of my head like Minerva, speaking with the humourlessness of a Susan Sontag. As an old movie buff, I also drew on Parker Tyler, one of the first intellectuals to take the movies seriously.” Vidal especially liked that Tyler wrote ponderously, for example, about Lana Turner’s ankle and how it “reminded him of something Spengler once said” in such 1940s classics of film criticism as The Hollywood Hallucination and Magic and Myth of the Movies. (After Vidal sent Tyler an autographed copy of Myra Breckinridge and inscribed it “le maitre Tyler,” Tyler himself claimed, “I don’t think Gore Vidal would have ever conceived this heroine otherwise, because Myra really is a disciple of mine. That’s the simple truth!”)
There were other fathers of Myra as well. In addition to Sontag and Parker, Vidal conjured up Anaïs Nin. He used the words “hot stuff” to describe her book Incest, from a Journal of Love: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1932–1934. As he devoured Incest, Vidal realized that the voice of Myra Breckinridge “was actually that of Anaïs in all the flowing megalomania of the diaries. Lying had become her first, not second, nature; yet even that would not have mattered so much had she not set herself up as a diarist who told the absolute truth.”
For Myra’s dress and physique, Vidal took to the street. His trannie mimicked a huge statue of a Las Vegas showgirl that used to rotate outside his fifth-floor window at the Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Boulevard, where he resided in the 1950s when toiling for MGM as a screenwriter. The plaster Amazon held a sombrero in one hand, the fingers of her other begloved hand splayed out at the hip. A blue brassiere covered with white stars adorned her bosom, and from there the bra spurted red and white stripes to cover her equally Brobdingnagian derriere and crotch. “Oh God, to wake up in the morning with a hangover and look out and see that figure turning, turning, holding the sombrero—you knew what death would be like,” Vidal noted.
Then there was the name Breckinridge. It was not entirely Vidal’s creation. John Cabell Breckinridge was an American actor and drag queen of little renown who starred as The Ruler in Ed Wood’s cult classic Plan 9 from Outer Space. Born in Paris, Breckinridge was the great-great-great-grandson of U.S. attorney general John Breckinridge (and the great-grandson of both U.S. vice president and Confederate general John C. Breckinridge and Wells Fargo bank founder Lloyd Tevis). How the fictitious Myra Breckinridge came to resemble the real John Cabell Breckinridge is that both wanted to undergo a sex change operation. But unlike Myra, John was ordered by a judge in San Francisco to pay $8,500 a year to support his blind mother in England. Later, when Bunny—John Cabell Breckinridge called himself Bunny—traveled to get an inexpensive castration in Mexico, a bad car accident prevented him from doing so, and he gave up on the idea of becoming a woman à la Christine Jorgensen, his idol. As Vidal described him, Bunny Breckinridge was “just a big queen—very rich,” and he knew of him from overhearing his mother’s circle of friends at the Beverly Hills Hotel when the women referred to their “feathered friends,” a euphemism for fairies. Feathered friends or fairies, the subject of homosexuality was not out of bounds for such a sophisticated group. “Bunny Breckinridge was a famous queen who had married and gone to prison in that order or, if not in that order, the other way around, and all the ladies had met him, including my mother, and that was all, and then I never thought of him again,” Vidal recalled.
Until he started work on Myra Breckinridge.
Prophetically, when he finished the first longhand draft of that novel, there was again a new moon over the Vatican. An incredibly short pregnancy, only one month had passed from start to finish of his book.
A few weeks later, Vidal showed a polished version to his friend Jane Fonda, who was also living in Rome at the time, on the Via Appia Antica. Barbarella, directed by her then-husband Roger Vadim and written by Terry Southern, had brought the actress to the Eternal City, and she called her rented home, on the outskirts of the city, “part castle, part dungeon.” During one dinner party, to which Vidal and Southern had been invited, the second century BC tower in which they were eating underwent an impromptu renovation. A small chunk of plaster fell from the tower’s ceiling and an owl dropped onto Vidal’s plate of food. “Can I have the recipe?” he asked his hostess.
If the moon over the Vatican was a sign, so was the dead bird. Regarding her interest in playing Myra onscreen, Jane Fonda mentioned that she was already in the midst of playing a sex icon and might not be in the market for another such role.
Barbarella began its life as an erotic comic strip, published in the avant-garde Evergreen Review, and the svengali Vadim, who’d previously romanced and directed Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve, somehow talked his current actress-wife-blonde into rejecting the female lead in Warren Beatty’s Bonnie and Clyde to play the title role in his sci-fi film about a female astronaut traveling through space and having a few hundred orgasms along the way in the year AD 40,000. By the time Fonda read Myra Breckinridge, she’d just shot the risqué title sequence of Barbarella in which she performed a weightless striptease in a spaceship. It was one of Southern’s favorite scenes. Vadim’s, too. Since it was her naked body up there onscreen, Fonda wasn’t so sure. “Vadim promised that the letters in the film credits would be placed judiciously to cover what needed to be covered,” Fonda reported. But again, she wasn’t so sure.
Over dinner and a dead owl, Vidal confronted a rather skittish Fonda. She had no idea how moviegoers, much less critics, would respond to the cartoon sex of Barbarella. The actress had gotten so jittery at the Dino De Laurentiis studio in Rome that she started popping Dexedrine, while her director-husband took to binge drinking to calm his nerves. Even Vadim had to admit, “It looks more like a Brigitte Bardot type of movie, it is true. Sex is there.”
One fictitious sex icon, as it turned out, was enough for Fonda, even if Vadim also wanted to bring Myra Breckinridge to the screen. She’d already turned down Terry Southern, who wanted the thirty-year-old actress to play the coed Candy—that is, when the Candy producers were still interested in his screenplay. In a way, Barbarella was much closer to Candy, screwing her way through life—only in space. Myra was from another galaxy entirely. Fonda adored Vidal and even liked his new novel. But playing a transsexual rapist onscreen mystified her, and with utmost diplomacy she informed Vidal, “I don’t think I know how to play it.”
Two other prepublication reviews of Vidal’s novel ran the gamut. Christopher Isherwood called it his friend’s “very best satirical work.” But then Vidal had inoculated himself from a bad review by dedicating the book to Isherwood, who a few years earlier had dedicated his autobiographical novel A Single Man to Vidal.
Less flattering was the review Vidal received from his father, Lieutenant Eugene Luther Vidal. An aviation pioneer and erstwhile lover of Amelia Earhart, the lieutenant was oft mentioned many years earlier in the same breath as his 1930s contemporaries Charles Lindbergh, J. Edgar Hoover, and Henry R. Luce. The older Vidal read the younger Vidal’s as-yet unpublished novel Myra Breckinridge and immediately underwent an uncomfortable case of déjà vu. He’d been here before—or, at least, he felt his son’s literary reputation had been here before. Back in 1946, when Gore Vidal was a mere nineteen years old, he’d written and published his first novel, Williwaw, set during World War II and based upon his own Alaskan Harbor Detachment duty. The novel received glowing reviews. His precocious genius reputation, however, proved short-lived, even for one leaving his teenage years. In 1948, Vidal’s follow-up novel, The City and the Pillar, caused a furor for its graphic and nonjudgmental depiction of homosexuality and put his literary career on indefinite hold.
Vidal recalled, “It was believed in right-wing circles that I invented same sexuality in 1948 with The City and the Pillar, that nothing like that had ever happened in the United States until my book. I feel like Prometheus having brought fire from heaven.”
The editors at the New York Times treated it more like fire from hell and refused to review Vidal’s next five novels, as if the taint might infect the entire newsroom. At the time, Vidal took comfort in the banished company of a sex researcher whose book The Kinsey Report came out a month after The City and the Pillar. “And the shocked New York Times would not advertise either book,” Vidal noted. Due to the press blackout, the financially strapped Vidal cranked out any number of screenplays for the Hollywood factory in the following years. By the early 1960s, however, he was enjoying a literary rebound thanks to the Broadway success of The Best Man and his novel Julian, a fictional account of fourth-century Rome, which happened to be Vidal’s first major work of fiction in more than a decade.
Eugene Vidal—good-looking, tall, blue-eyed—sincerely felt that Myra Breckinridge might undo his son’s long climb back to respectability from The City and the Pillar. Regarding Myra Breckinridge, he believed, “Gore has slipped upon this one.” He was even more blunt when he expressed that thought to his son. “I never found rear ends sexually attractive,” said the lieutenant, referring to the novel’s soon-to-be-infamous rape scene.
Despite his father’s misgivings, Vidal traveled to New York City to deliver the unexpurgated Myra Breckinridge manuscript to his publisher. He kept in mind something that William Faulkner had told him years earlier about another great but compromised author. “You know, Hemingway’s problem is that he never takes chances,” said Faulkner. “You have got to keep going as far out as you can, as far as your imagination will take you.” Vidal’s imagination took him to Myra Breckinridge, and with Faulkner’s words in mind he gave his novel to Little, Brown and Company.
While in New York City, Vidal took time to have lunch with the British film director John Schlesinger, who’d had a great success a couple of years earlier with Darling, which epitomized the new, hip, swinging London and made Julie Christie a star. Schlesinger was also about to release Far from the Madding Crowd, which would have the effect of nearly undoing everything good that Darling had achieved for him and Christie.
Until the movie gods reversed his fate, Schlesinger remained a proud, successful director, and he wanted to talk to Vidal about his new film, the first he would direct in the United States. They met at the Plaza hotel’s tea room, and Schlesinger brought the film’s producer, Jerome Hellman, who had come aboard on the project when Joseph Janni, the producer on Schlesinger’s four previous movies, found himself repulsed by the thought of making a movie about a lowlife male hustler who worked the streets of Times Square.
“I’m looking for someone to adapt the novel Midnight Cowboy to the screen,” said Schlesinger, and he wondered if Vidal might be interested in taking a whack at James Leo Herlihy’s bestseller.
Vidal knew the novel about a dim-witted dishwasher who leaves Texas to become a New York City gigolo and instead ends up prostituting himself with male customers. Vidal didn’t have to think long, and was brief to the point of insult. “Oh, I think I’ve already done that with The City and the Pillar. Why don’t you make that into a movie?” he asked, referring to his novel, which had nothing to do with Times Square hustling or Texas dishwashing. Vidal dismissed Schlesinger’s project with a quick “The subject seems kind of silly.”
Then he changed the subject. “So let’s just enjoy our lunch.” Which was being expense-accounted to United Artists. Regarding Vidal’s rejection, Hellman chalked it up to “Gore’s arrogant ego.”
Vidal could only hope that his editor, Ned Bradford, at Little, Brown would be more receptive, as well as diplomatic, regarding his new novel about a dildo-touting transsexual who takes on all of civilization west of the San Gabriel Mountains with little more than an encyclopedic knowledge of the world according to Twentieth Century Fox.
Vidal recalled his apprehension, which proved unfounded: “I hoped that Ned and the publisher, Arthur Thornhill, would not be too upset by Myra’s exuberant pansexuality. Fortunately, they were not.” Vidal never considered Bradford a problem. Thornhill was another matter. The publisher had strongly objected to a scene Vidal put in his novel Washington, D.C., written the previous year, that featured a masturbation session between two boys. Luckily, Thornhill underwent a sudden liberal conversion around the time Vidal submitted his follow-up manuscript. He no longer really cared if Myra Breckinridge tarnished the reputation of Little, Brown or not, because he would soon be selling his publishing company to Time, Inc. He did, however, insist that Vidal sign a release holding himself solely responsible for any obscenity lawsuits resulting from the publication of Myra Breckinridge.
Vidal’s London publisher, Heinemann, proved even more cautious than the ready-to-be-auctioned Little, Brown. Heinemann rejected the novel outright, and to see Myra Breckinridge published in England, Vidal had to make a deal with a smaller house, Anthony Blond, which insisted on minor cuts, such as the lead character’s sex fantasies about real-life movie stars, like Ava Gardner, to avoid libel suits.
Fortunately, Vidal’s American publisher knew exactly how to publicize the novel. In some ways, the press campaign to promote Myra Breckinridge would presage the publication strategy of most books to come in the 1970s and beyond: Little, Brown did absolutely nothing to promote the book. Suddenly, without fanfare, on January 28, 1968, the novel’s discreet black-and-gold cover with a picture from Vidal’s inferno—that super-sized Sunset Boulevard Amazon—appeared in bookstores and airports everywhere. No less a tome than Newsweek noted the anti-hype hype campaign.
“Myra Breckinridge was quietly distributed to bookshops without as much as a whisper of publicity,” the newsweekly informed its readers. “No advance advertising, no copies sent to Publishers Weekly. No review copies distributed to newspapers or magazines . . . in defiance of all the usual prepublication rituals.”
Time magazine asserted that Little, Brown had “coquettishly” pleaded with critics that the book not be reviewed at all since “the sexual problems of the title character represent a suspense element vital to the novel’s enjoyment.” Time scoffed at the surprise of Myra/Myron’s metamorphosis, revealing that anyone who’d been “down to the local fag bar” would guess the secret. Joining the gay-bashing bandwagon, Newsweek charged that Myra Breckinridge “becomes, in the end, a kind of erotic propaganda for homosexuality.” (Vidal couldn’t disagree there. “Myra favors anything that would limit population,” he volleyed back.) And the New York Times, still smarting from its The City and the Pillar hissy fit twenty years earlier, wrote in its dismissive pan that the book went from “high camp to low bitchery.”
In a way, the cautious Eugene Vidal, after his initial doubts, offered the best defense of Myra Breckinridge’s creator: “Most of us worry about being popular, but him, never,” said the father of Gore Vidal.
THE NEW YORK TIMES’S antipathy toward homosexuals did not end when it began reviewing Vidal’s novels again with Julian in 1964. Only the year before, the Gray Lady printed a five-thousand-word, page-one article titled “Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern,” by staffer Richard Doty, who deeply regretted the city’s harboring of “probably the greatest homosexual population in the world,” and went on to reveal how “the overt homosexual has become . . . an obtrusive part of the New York scene,” as well as a “subject of growing concern of psychiatrists, religious leaders, and the police.” The newspaper of record had recently promoted A. M. Rosenthal to metropolitan editor, and it became his crusade to clean up the city for the upcoming World’s Fair in 1964, and beyond.
“Everyone below Rosenthal spent all of their time trying to figure out what to do to cater to his prejudices,” said Times reporter Charles Kaiser. “One of these widely perceived prejudices was Abe’s homophobia. So editors throughout the paper would keep stories concerning gays out of the paper.”
Or, in the case of the Richard Doty article, in the paper on page one. The result was that gay bars were increasingly raided. Theaters like the Gramercy Arts, the New Bowery, and the Writers’ Stage were closed for showing such gay-themed underground films as Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, and Jean Genet’s Chant d’Amour.
And it wasn’t just homosexuals who got attacked. Lenny Bruce was arrested and convicted on obscenity charges for using four-letter words and Yiddish words like “schmuck” in his act at Cafe Au Go Go.
Ironically, it was the Times’ publication of one of its more infamous anti-homosexual tirades of the 1960s that inspired Natalie Wood’s ex-secretary to write The Boys in the Band.
On January 23, 1966, Mart Crowley opened that Sunday’s New York Times and, as was his custom, went right to the Arts & Leisure section, soon to be known as the Gay Sports Pages. There, at the top of page one in bold type, Crowley saw the heading “The Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises.” Almost as shocking as those words was the byline. The essay had been written by the newspaper’s august theater critic Stanley Kauffmann, who took the opportunity this particular Sabbath to bemoan the state of the American theater for its lionization of homosexual playwrights who wrote “a badly distorted picture of American women, marriage, and society in general.” Kauffmann didn’t name “the three most popular playwrights,” all of whom just happened to be homosexual, but there was no mistaking the objects of his criticism: Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Edward Albee. “Why can’t they just write about their own kind?” Kauffmann wanted to know, and, in essence, leave heterosexuals alone to enjoy the theater of lesser talented, or, better yet, dead playwrights. (Kauffmann’s diatribe wasn’t the first of its kind: In 1965, psychiatrist Dr. Donald Kaplan attacked Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in the Tulane Drama Review for being “homosexual theater.”)
Vidal, Albee, and others were incensed by Kauffmann’s bigotry—“Short people can’t write about tall people?” Albee asked many years later—but, at the time, they didn’t express their disgust in letters or phone calls to the almighty Times.
Crowley, once he’d put down the Sunday Times, taken a sip of coffee, and pondered Kauffmann’s thesis, found a small morsel of hope at the core of the essay’s narrow-mindedness. He kept coming back to three sentences that Kauffmann wrote, “If [the homosexual] is to write of his experience, he must invent a two-sex version of the one-sex experience that he really knows. It is we who insist on it. Not he.”
Eureka! “Why not me?” Crowley thought.
Homosexual playwrights writing homosexual characters? “It was an interesting notion that no one had done this before,” said Crowley. “It would be refreshing to let it all hang out. And what did I have to lose? Nothing.”
The thing Crowley hated about plays that did dare to include a gay character or two is that they invariably turned sexual orientation into a surprise factor, the big revelation reserved for the third act. “Well, life is not like that,” he believed. “Not all faggots bump themselves off at the end of the play.”
If Vidal wrote Myra Breckinridge in a four-week burst, Crowley took only a week longer to complete the first draft of The Boys in the Band, inspired by an all-gay birthday party he attended in Los Angeles with his good friend Howard Jeffrey. Broke and out of a job, Crowley wrote the play while house-sitting actress Diana Lynn’s manse in Beverly Hills because “I had to sublet my own house to a European actor making a bad movie in Hollywood,” he recalled. In his former life as Natalie Wood’s secretary, he’d written a screenplay, Cassandra at the Wedding, in which the actress would play twin sisters, one of whom is lesbian. “Natalie was game, but Darryl Zanuck pulled the plug,” says Crowley.
“Too many dykeisms,” Zanuck had complained.
Then Crowley wrote The Decorator, a TV pilot for producer Dominick Dunne. It was to star Bette Davis as an interior designer, but the network didn’t pick it up. By 1967, Crowley had “nothing to lose” writing about eight, possibly nine, homosexual men at a party in Manhattan in which one of the characters is given a hustler for his birthday present.
Crowley had nothing to lose—except his mind, in Dominick Dunne’s opinion.
The two men were at opposite ends of the Hollywood totem pole. Dunne was vice president of Four Star Television. Crowley was Natalie Wood’s former secretary. One night, regardless of their employment disparity, they found themselves together at a party in Malibu for the Royal Ballet of England, a fete that featured much wine, grass, line-dancing, and ogling of the most beautiful dancers in the world. Taking a break from the voyeuristic rites, Dunne asked his unemployed writer-friend to take a walk on the beach. Both men slipped off their shoes. “I’m worried about you,” Dunne began. “You’re drinking and not working. What’s going on?”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Crowley replied. “I’m busy. I’m writing a play.”
“Great. What’s it about?”
Crowley told Dunne as much as he knew about the gestating project. “It’s about a bunch of gay guys getting together at a birthday party.”
Stunned, Dunne tried to be diplomatic. “Well, Mart, I think it’s great you’re writing a play. It’s good for you. It’s therapeutic. . . .”
“It’s going to be terrific. It is terrific!” Crowley exclaimed.
When Dunne asked the play’s title, Crowley said he liked The Birthday Party but Harold Pinter had beaten him to it. Then there was Somebody’s Children, but it was too maudlin. “How about The Boys in the Band?” Crowley asked.
Dunne didn’t know what it meant. Crowley explained: It’s that line in A Star Is Born when James Mason tells a distraught Judy Garland, “You’re singing for yourself and the boys in the band.”
Still stunned, Dunne realized his friend could not be deterred. “Just don’t let it throw you if it doesn’t get produced,” he offered weakly.
Crowley said he wasn’t worried. He was going to the East Coast in a week. Natalie Wood had already talked to her fiancé, Richard Gregson, whose agency, London International, had offices in New York City. Gregson would get him an agent to represent the play. After all, “I knew people were not going to jump to perform this play. But that’s what made it different.” He just knew it.
On his plane trip eastward, Crowley never considered that London International might not represent his play. That possibility occurred to him only later, when he met the agent Janet Roberts. It was clear from their initial, tepid handshake that the meeting was pro forma, a courtesy to Gregson—and nothing more.
Crowley hand-delivered his typed manuscript to Roberts, and she offered to read it that very afternoon while he went around the block to see Bike Boy, the Andy Warhol movie playing in a run-down movie house nearby. When he returned to her office, Roberts was “a changed woman,” Crowley noted. And not in a good way. She sat at her desk, straightening pencils, scooping up cigarette ash into little piles, patting everything down, and never once looking Crowley in the eye. Finally, she said something. “I don’t know anyone I can send this to,” she began. “I don’t know why Richard sent you. We couldn’t possibly send this play out on our letterhead.”
Crowley asked why not.
“This is, why, it’s like a weekend on Fire Island!” she exclaimed in horror.
Crowley thought, “Not a weekend, darling. At best a day, I obey the unities!” But he didn’t say that. He just sat there.
Roberts did offer him a smidgen of hope regarding a possible production. “Maybe in five years,” she said. “Maybe ten years, but not now.”
Crowley choked as the walls of the agent’s office started to tighten around him. Maybe Dominick Dunne was right. Maybe no one wanted this play. “What about Richard Barr?” he blurted out. “Could you send it to him?”
“Of course I know Richard Barr,” said Roberts. “Why him?”
“Anyone who had the courage and foresight to produce Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? would be right for this play. Would you send it to him?”
Roberts went back to her neat piles of cigarette ash. Again, she avoided looking at Crowley. “We couldn’t officially submit it to him.” Finally, she came up with a compromise: “We’ll ask his opinion.”
With Diana Lynn having returned to her Beverly Hills house and that European actor still renting Crowley’s West Hollywood apartment, the author of the possibly moribund Boys in the Band suddenly found himself without a home, money, or options. In New York City, Crowley was staying with friends, the actor Robert Moore and his partner, George Rondo. The day after Crowley’s humiliation at London International, the phone in Moore’s Eighth Avenue apartment rang. It was Janet Roberts. She wanted to speak to Mart Crowley.
“Well, I don’t know how to tell you this,” she began. “I’m really surprised. Can you have drinks with Richard Barr and Edward Albee this afternoon at five o’clock? At Barr’s apartment?”
There, six hours later in Richard Barr’s apartment, Mart Crowley listened as the producer of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? told him that he wanted to stage his play, The Boys in the Band, at the Playwrights’ Unit, a theater devoted to new plays that was operated by him, Albee, and fellow Virginia Woolf producer Clinton Wilder. It would be a workshop situation. There would be only five performances.
Barr was enthusiastic in his praise of Crowley’s play. Albee let Barr do the talking. Crowley noted, “Edward didn’t say he liked it. He didn’t say he didn’t like it.”
Since the Playwrights’ Unit had a backlog of unproduced plays written by other young, promising writers like Sam Shepard, Terrence McNally, and John Guare, they didn’t have an opening for at least three months. Maybe there would be a slot in January to get the play up and running, and to see what they had. Crowley blurted out, “Could Robert Moore direct?”
Albee, of course, knew the actor from his upcoming Broadway production of Everything in the Garden, in which Moore played the supporting role of a man murdered by neighbors who operate a suburban brothel. Yes, Moore would be perfect to direct The Boys in the Band, it was decided. Since Albee’s play was scheduled to open that November, Moore could direct Crowley’s play during the day when he wasn’t at the Plymouth Theatre being murdered at night.
“It was October 1967,” Crowley recalled. “Out on Fire Island, I polished The Boys in the Band.” Moore helped with rewrites; he made several suggestions, especially with regard to rearranging some of the dialogue and scenes—that is, until Crowley exploded, telling him, “I asked you to direct The Boys in the Band. I didn’t ask you to fucking rewrite The Boys in the Band!”
Moore shot back, “I’m only directing this play to get you out of my apartment!”
While the show’s respective playwright and director, Mart Crowley and Robert Moore, may have had “nothing to lose,” the actors they chose to be their “boys” did. Laurence Luckinbill, Leonard Frey, Cliff Gorman, Kenneth Nelson, Frederick Combs, and Keith Prentice had assembled, among them, an impressive résumé of New York stage credits, including such well-known titles as A Man for All Seasons, Fiddler on the Roof, The Fantasticks, A Taste of Honey, and The Sound of Music. In other words, they weren’t novices, and they all risked future employment by playing homosexuals onstage in the year 1968.
Agents traditionally send their clients the script before an audition. It was different with The Boys in the Band. The actors had to go to the theater to read the play. There were two reasons for this departure from tradition: the work’s unconventional subject matter, and the fact that the New York agencies put up an unofficial boycott of the play. Luckinbill’s agent, the same Janet Roberts who was now Crowley’s reluctant agent, told her actor-client, “Don’t get involved. It will wreck your career.” Compounding her lack of faith in the project was Roberts’s fear that representing the play might expose her as a lesbian who was married to a gay man. Luckinbill, however, needed the work.
So did Leonard Frey. “I read the play and, well, I must do this because I’m out of work and it is a play. Playing a pockmarked Jew fairy didn’t make me hesitate a bit,” said Frey.
Cliff Gorman had just appeared in Hogan’s Goat with Faye Dunaway and was down to his last two weeks of unemployment insurance when his agent informed him that they were casting a North Carolina production of The Knack at the Playwrights’ Unit. He was told, “There may be a part in it for you.”
The Unit, however, had already cast that show by the time he showed up for the audition. “There’s nothing in The Knack,” a casting director told Gorman, “but we are doing a play here at the Unit, an original play called The Boys in the Band. Now, it’s about homosexuality, that’s the theme. To be quite frank with you, the play’s been cast, but there’s one part that nobody wants to do. It’s the part of a very effeminate homosexual. We’ve tried to get actors who are overtly gay to play the role, they won’t do it. There’s something that turns them off about it and they can’t. Would you like to read for it?”
Gorman said, “Yeah, I don’t give a shit.”
He read, they liked him, but the next day they informed him, “Very good, but someone else is doing it.” Then they called a day later to tell Gorman that the other actor had decided against playing such an outrageous homosexual. “You wanna do the role?”
“Yeah, I don’t give a shit.”
Others in the cast were less experienced or had no experience whatsoever on the stage. Like Reuben Green, who was a good-looking print model. Or Robert La Tourneaux, whom Crowley spotted at the popular tea dance at Fire Island Pines, and thought looked right to play the empty-headed hustler, the show’s “birthday present.” Robert Moore took one look at La Tourneaux and nixed the idea. “You’re so Hollywood in your casting,” he told Crowley.
“He’s only got eleven lines in the play,” replied Crowley. “How bad can he be?”
Although he studied at the Yale School of Drama, Peter White had virtually no professional experience onstage. He worried about ruining his career before he got started in the business. But, “They’ve got respectable actors who have careers,” he thought. White didn’t even have a career, yet. He knew the legendary movie actress Myrna Loy, and it was she who convinced him to take the role. “Peter, if you want to be an actor, you’ve got to take risks,” she told him.
But no sooner was White cast as Alan, the party’s interloper who may or may not be gay, than his agent fired him for accepting the role. “We all lost our agents,” White recalled.
Shortly before The Boys in the Band opened in late January for the first of its five performances at the Playwrights’ Unit, White asked Crowley if the Alan character is gay or straight. “I don’t know,” said Crowley. “Make up whatever you want, just don’t do it tonight.”
Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge hit the bookstores almost to the day that Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band opened in New York City. It was January 23, 1968, and the wicked six-degree temperature that night kept more than a few of the theater’s two hundred seats unsold. Crowley, Robert Moore, and Richard Barr were milling about among the empty seats in the back rows at 15 Vandam Street. Crowley suddenly came down with a bad attack of dry mouth. He had trouble swallowing but managed to ask Moore, “Do you think they’ll laugh?”
Moore told him not to worry. “They’ve been laughing at fags since Aristophanes. They’re not going to stop tonight,” he said.
The next morning “word somehow got out,” said Crowley, and despite the cold rain, a line of black umbrellas stretched down the street for more than a block beyond the theater’s box office. Crowley told himself, “Wow! It’s like the third act of Our Town out there! Minus the funeral.”
After opening night of the workshop, The Boys in the Band sold out its other four performances, which quickly grew to nine—the audiences virtually all male. Richard Barr wasted no time taking out an option for a full commercial production at Theater Four on West Fifty-Fifth Street. Edward Albee, however, did not come aboard as producer or investor. “I found it highly skillful work that I despised,” he said. “Barr understood the commercial value of the play. He may have liked it a great deal. I expressed my opinion that the play did serious damage to a burgeoning gay respectability movement in New York City. That’s why I was opposed to it being produced.”
Crowley would later scoff at that criticism. “It was 1968! There was no gay respectability movement,” he said.
Albee wasn’t the only one at the Playwrights’ Unit to object to The Boys in the Band. The third partner in the triumvirate left the theater over objections to the play. As Crowley described him, “Clinton Wilder was a wealthy man, who was a patron of the arts. He was very uptight for a gay man, and he wanted nothing to do with The Boys in the Band.”
Wilder drew the line somewhere between The Boys in the Band and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which he’d been skittish about getting involved with half a dozen years earlier. Back in 1962, when he first showed an early draft of Virginia Woolf to the show’s press agent, Howard Atlee, he cautioned, “Here it is, if you can get through it.” And even Virginia Woolf did not get to Broadway without some reservations from the more liberal Richard Barr, who thought the script overused the words “fuck” and “motherfucker,” which had been uttered Off Broadway but never on Broadway. Barr told Albee, “I’ll take one ‘fuck’ uptown.” The producer feared that “the sensationalism of breaking the ‘word-barrier’ would prejudice” reviewers, maybe even “revolt” them. In the end, Albee substituted the word “screw” and went on to also remove “shit” and “bullshit,” replacing them with “hell,” “crap,” and “nuts.”
“Fuck,” uttered a few times in The Boys in the Band, was minor stuff in 1968, although the word had not yet been heard in a Broadway show. “When we closed [at the Unit], word had it that maybe somebody would stage the play off-Broadway, and maybe on Broadway,” Cliff Gorman recalled. “So there was a lot of laughter about that, because we said it couldn’t be done. You know, you couldn’t say ‘fuck’ on the [Broadway] stage at that time. So we all packed up our make-up and went home” after the show’s initial nine performances.
Only the year before, Jules Feiffer introduced the word “shit” to Broadway with his comedy Little Murders, where the word was mentioned four times in as many minutes. (And perhaps as a result, Feiffer’s show played only eight performances before closing. In London, the Lord Chamberlain made him change the word “shit” to “dog crap,” which Feiffer found “infinitely more vulgar.”)
More than uttering the word “fuck” a lot, the characters in The Boys in the Band broke ground in that they presented their sexual orientation as a given, and not something to be cured or revealed as a secret to titillate the audience. It’s what distinguished it from The Killing of Sister George, by Frank Marcus, and A Patriot for Me, by John Osborne, both of which had run into censorship problems in their home country of Britain.
Most people involved with The Boys in the Band doubted it would ever resurface on Broadway or Off Broadway in a full-blown commercial production. As the show’s set designer, Peter Harvey, put it, “I’m sure everyone gay in New York will come, and when they’ve seen it we’ll close it.”