I can find no mention of Bill Harris having had lunch with the Beesleys before January 7, 1945; this was probably his second visit.
The Beesleys liked him and on later occasions made opportunities for Bill and Christopher to have sex, by going out and leaving them together, or even by suggesting to Christopher, “Wouldn’t you like to take a bath?” (This suggestion wasn’t quite as shameless as it sounded, because it was a long-established custom that Christopher should be offered a bath when he came to see them. It was like offering a bath to a serviceman who is in camp. At the Vedanta Center, the bathroom was shared by several people, and an unhurried soak in a spotless tub was a real luxury for Christopher.)1
The house which had once belonged to John Barrymore was
somewhere in that neighborhood. Its most remarkable feature was a very tall totem pole in the garden. My memory is of a building like a cloister, with a row of dark small cluttered rooms which stank; the place was then unoccupied. It may have stood empty since
Barrymore’s death in 1942. I remember tales of the filthy state it had been in during his later lifetime––the rooms like sties full of drunken guests snoring amidst their shit and vomit. Maybe Alec Beesley had got permission to look around the house by pretending he wanted to rent it. Or maybe they were simply trespassing.
Day-to-day diary, January 22: “Tried to hitchhike north with Bill, and failed.” Bill Harris and Christopher waited on the Pacific Coast Highway, at the Channel Road entrance to Santa Monica Canyon, 1 When Christopher later told John van Druten and Carter Lodge about his lovemaking with Bill at the Beesleys’, Carter professed to be shocked. He said something to the effect that it was “turning your friends’ home into a whorehouse” to do such a thing. Coming from Carter, this seemed a most mysterious piece of hypocrisy, since Carter himself had taken a shower at the Beesleys’ with Christopher, only recently, after swimming in their pool, and they had played around together––as they often did when they happened to be alone. Their relationship was intimate but casual––they had been going to bed together at long intervals ever since they first met in 1939. John knew about this––Christopher had told him––and he didn’t mind at all.
Why did Carter say he was shocked? Perhaps he resented the fact that the Beesleys would never have invited him to behave as Christopher behaved. He probably felt (and with good reason) that they didn’t really treat him as a friend––only as John’s friend.
¾ 1945 ¾
13
for several hours, trying without success to thumb a ride. The war was still very much on, despite increasing prospects of peace––
gasoline rationing was in force and nonmilitary traffic, other than local, was greatly reduced. Bill and Christopher were presumably hoping to catch a car which would take them to Santa Barbara at least, if not to San Francisco; and these were rare.
I find this episode (or non-episode) curious and puzzling. It doesn’t seem to belong to the style of the Bill–Christopher relationship. To set forth impulsively on an unplanned indefinite hobo trip is something which the Christopher of six years earlier might have done with Vernon Old. Their journey across the U.S. by bus was a modified version of the hobo trip––Whitman, “We Two Boys
Together Clinging,” the “Song of the Open Road,” etc. The
Vernon–Christopher relationship aspired to be Whitmanesque––at least, Christopher certainly felt that it was or could be. He fell in love with Vernon as an embodiment of The American Boy.
But now, with Bill Harris, as a forty-year-old lapsed monk,
Christopher is attempting a different, more mature style. Why did he suddenly decide on this boyish elopement? Was he trying to prove to Bill how young he still was? Was he running away from the
Vedanta Center, or from Denny Fouts? If so, how long did he plan to remain out of town? I simply cannot remember.
It is also possible that Christopher already knew about Pancho Moraturi, Bill’s Argentine friend, who was urging Bill to come and live with him. In this case, Christopher may have planned the trip up north as a last fling. He can’t have wanted to carry Bill off from Pancho permanently. He must have known then what became
obvious to him when he was rewriting his journals a year later, that his intentions toward Bill were not and never had been really serious.
On January 23, Christopher and Bill Harris were down in Santa Monica again. (I suppose they made these trips by bus. Christopher cycled sometimes, but only when he was alone.1 Bill was now living on La Cienega Boulevard; more about this later.) That evening, at Denny’s apartment, there was a party—Chris Wood came, and Stef Brecht ([Bertolt] Brecht’s son) and Paul Fox, a friend of Chris’s, who was a set designer and worked, appropriately enough, at
Twentieth Century-Fox. Christopher and Bill spent the night in one of the back rooms of the 137 Entrada Drive building. I
1 In Santa Monica, he sometimes cycled with Denny. Denny had begun to compose a cycling song with Christopher, to the tune of “Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes,” but they had got no further than the first couplet: “Just a pair of cycling queens / No longer in their teens . . .”
14
Lost Years
remember Stef, in his formal European way, nodding toward Bill and then saying politely to Christopher, “I congratulate you, he is extremely attractive.”1
I see from the day-to-day diary that John Goodwin was also there.
It is odd that I don’t have more memories of him, for he was often with Denny. My impression is that Christopher didn’t really like John but was hardly aware of this. Christopher and John were
outwardly friendly. John had actually encouraged Bill to have an affair with Christopher. And Christopher himself was, not very energetically, on the make for John––John pretended to be flattered by this, but didn’t encourage him to go ahead. Nevertheless, I feel that Christopher was constantly being repelled by John’s rudeness, selfishness and arrogance. Christopher hated little rich boys in his deepest heart, no matter how talented they were, or how physically attractive.
On January 24, the day-to-day diary records that Bill Harris “had date at Selznick.” Probably John Darrow the agent and ex-actor had arranged that Bill should see the casting director at the Selznick Studios. ( John Darrow had had an affair with Bill, shortly before Christopher.) Nothing came of the interview, however.
On January 24, it is also recorded that there was Ram Nam in the evening and that Swami returned to the center from a stay at the ashram in Santa Barbara. Christopher still showed up to take part in these ceremonies, still spent time with Swami, but almost no memories remain of his life at the center during this final period. He was obsessed by Denny’s Santa Monica world and by Bill Harris; and that is what has left its mark.
On January 27, Christopher went with Bill and Denny to the
Follies and the Burbank, two burlesque shows. Here are some notes he made, either about these performances or some others he saw at that time:
The hard round bellies, the clutching gestures, the bumps, the grinds, the splits. The hair shaken over the face, to suggest lust and 1 I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but the story went around that Stef, with his Germanic thoroughness, decided to find out what homosexual sex was like. So he went to bed with one of his friends. It didn’t convert him, but he is supposed to have remarked later that the experience was “extremely pleasant”––or, more likely, “wirklich ganz angenehm [really quite agreeable].”
(Stef sometimes made you think that Thomas Mann should have been his father, rather than Brecht; he had the sort of urbanity that goes with pince-nez.
And yet he was really sexy, in an odd way. I think most of us would have liked to go to bed with him.)