The next day, June 3, was a Sunday, so Steve was able to come down to Denny’s. Steve and Christopher drove to Lake Sherwood.
When they got back, Denny was giving a party. I am nearly certain that this was the occasion on which a pretty blond naval officer named Willy Tompkins[*] and an army lieutenant were persuaded by the other guests to take off their clothes and have sex on the couch, with everybody watching. This excited [one of the guests] so much that he wanted to do the same with Christopher, but Christopher was embarrassed and wouldn’t. (Willy Tompkins and the lieutenant later retired to Jay’s apartment and made love in private.)
On June 4, Christopher went back to work at Warner’s––almost
certainly on Up at the Villa, with Wolfgang Reinhardt.1
1 Wolfgang wanted to stick close to the Maugham story. His chief deviation from it was to have Rowley plant some clues around the corpse so that the Italian police are tricked into thinking that Karl (called Paul in the script) has been killed by the Gestapo, which makes them hastily drop the case and announce that death was due to heart attack. This was Wolfgang’s idea and I think it works very well––culminating in a good cross-purpose comedy scene between the Italian chief of police and the German consul, in which they both deplore the carelessness of the Gestapo’s murder methods.
The code prevented Wolfgang and Christopher from making it clear that Mary and Paul actually have sex together before he shoots himself. Rereading the script today, I can’t be sure just how much of a disadvantage this would have been, if the film had been made. (It never was.) The scene as Maugham
[* Not his real name.]
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This must also have been the day on which Christopher first
discovered, or at least suspected, that he had caught the clap. On June 5, he went to a Dr. Zeiler to be examined and on the 6th he spent the day at Dr. Zeiler’s office, being given shots of penicillin. The shots cured him right away––he only saw Dr. Zeiler once more, on the 11th, for a checkup. This was Christopher’s second dose of clap and its cure was a happy contrast to the first––those burning douches of potassium permanganate which the Brussels doctor squirted up Christopher’s smarting urethra, day after day, in December 1938.
The very atmosphere in the offices of the two doctors was quite different. The Brussels doctor was breezy but brutal and his office had a certain grimness, appropriate to those days, when even gonorrhea was a serious business and syphilis was sometimes incurable. Whereas Dr. Zeiler’s office seemed bright with the dawn of the Penicillin Era, the doctor gave the injections as casually as if they were flu shots and his nurse, when they had finished, smiled archly at Christopher and said, “That’ll teach you to be a good boy, won’t it?” No, not good, Christopher thought, but careful. Here was yet another situation in which he felt ashamed of himself and, at the same time, contemptuous of his shame. It was shaming to return from a V.D. clinic to a monastery, but only shaming when he imagined Swami somehow
finding out. Once again, he told himself that he must abandon his false position by leaving the center at the first possible opportunity.
It wasn’t Steve’s fault that he had infected Christopher; Steve was quite unaware that he had the clap, it was in his rectum, so there was no burning and no discharge. When they first went to bed together, Steve wanted Christopher to fuck him but added that this probably wouldn’t work, someone else had tried to and hadn’t been able to get inside. Christopher tried and succeeded. It always excited him to fuck a virgin and he felt pleasantly superior to the “someone else.”
But the joke was on Christopher, because the “someone else” had had clap and he had at least gotten in far enough to give it to Steve.
Steve was very apologetic. He expressed fears that Christopher would now stop wanting to see him. No doubt Christopher was
anxious to assure him that this wasn’t true––they met four times in the next seven days––but the clap really did draw them closer wrote it is more convincing, but not entirely so. It might have got some wrong laughs. And Maugham’s dialogue is hardly to be believed––he makes Karl say things like, “You have shown me heaven and now you want to thrust me back to earth”!
Christopher once summarized the plot to Collier as, “Humped, bumped, and dumped”––referring to the fate of the Karl–Paul character.) ¾ 1945 ¾
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together, for a short while at least; they had something in common, a shared experience. (Christopher couldn’t resist telling Collier about it, however. Collier was delighted. He rolled on the floor, laughing.
Thereafter, when Christopher came into his office in the morning, Collier would ask, “Well, my boy, what have you to report––of grave or gay?”) Steve was treated by a different doctor––a woman, I think––and quickly cured.
On June 7, Christopher went to a party at Rex Evans’s apartment; among the guests were Maugham, George Cukor and Ethel
Barrymore.
It seems to me that this must have been at the beginning of the time when Willie was staying with George Cukor and working on a script of The Razor’s Edge.1 It was quite possibly at this party that Christopher witnessed a truly classic display of unabashed ass licking.
Someone––I’m nearly sure it was Charlie Brackett––was talking to Maugham about a film they had watched together, a short while before. This someone said: “Mr. Maugham, I don’t know whether you remember––I certainly shall never forget it––as we were coming out of that theater, you made one of the most penetrating, one of the most profound criticisms I have ever heard in my life––you said, It’s not dramatic!” Willie didn’t reply, but he looked at the speaker with his old old black eyes––and the look said all that was necessary.
This was the first time that Christopher had seen Willie since January 1941, when Willie visited Los Angeles with Gerald Haxton.
Christopher had lately been told by Bill Caskey that he had been having an affair with Haxton in those days, and that Haxton had invited him to come out to California with him and Willie. Caskey had refused, for some reason, although he had liked Haxton very much. And now Haxton was dead; he had died in 1944. The day-today diary doesn’t record that Caskey ever went with Christopher to see Willie during his visit. Perhaps Caskey felt Willie wouldn’t want to see him, because of the association with Haxton.
June 9: “Saw The Letter in projection room. Helped Steve move his things to Rose Garden Apartments.”
This was the Bette Davis film version of the Maugham play, with its punishment-murder of Mrs. Crosbie tacked onto the story as a 1 According to Garson Kanin (Remembering Mr. Maugham), Willie didn’t begin work on his screenplay until November. Kanin says that Willie asked Cukor to show him the existing screenplay and was so horrified by it that he offered to write one himself, for free. I am almost sure Kanin is wrong about the date, however.
( June 24, 1977: Kanin was wrong. I have just seen the revised final draft of Maugham’s Razor’s Edge screenplay. It is dated July 25, 1945.) 38
Lost Years
concession to the censorship code. Maybe Christopher and Willie saw it together. Anyhow Willie did see the film about this time and, on being asked how he had liked it, made the famous answer, “I liked all the p-parts I wrote.”