But their association always had to be patched up because it was simply too tiresome for them to refuse to see each other, as long as Caskey and Christopher were living together. When Caskey and
Christopher split up, they immediately stopped meeting.
Aside from Denny’s apartment, Caskey and Christopher spent
much of their time together at The Friendship or at Jay’s apartment or in the kitchen of his restaurant.
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Lost Years
The Friendship1 had been doing terrific business throughout the war years and it was still crammed every weekend with servicemen and their pursuers, female and male. It was also the chief neighborhood bar and one of the very few gay bars in West Los Angeles. In other words, if you went in there, you had to be prepared to mingle with all sorts and conditions. I imagine that the more respectable Canyon dwellers had long since decided to stay away.
The noise was stunning, the tobacco smoke was a fog; you always spilled part of your drink as you eased your way through the crowd.
There were little tables you could sit at in pairs, your faces close together, yelling intimacies which no one else had a chance of hearing. This was the scene of Christopher’s courtship of Caskey; they seem to have felt more at ease with each other in such a state of public isolation than when they were actually alone together.
It must have been at this time that Caskey was earning some extra money washing dishes at Jay’s restaurant. Christopher used to come down in the evenings and help, for free. There was always plenty to drink and Christopher quite enjoyed dishwashing; he had done a lot of it while he was with the Quakers and at the Vedanta Center. Jay and his waiters (who were usually also his boyfriends) darted back and forth between the kitchen and the tiny dark dining room, from 1 The Friendship at this period is described in A Single Man as “The Starboard Side.” The sentence about “Girls dashing down from their apartments to drag some gorgeous endangered young drunk to safety and breakfast served next morning in bed . . .” refers to Jo Lathwood’s capture of Ben Masselink. Jo was living at her apartment on West Channel Road (“Las Ondas”), only a few doors from The Friendship, throughout this period, but Christopher didn’t get to know her until later.
Peter Viertel writes about The Friendship and its owner, Doc Law, in his first novel The Canyon. He calls Doc Law “Doc Winters” and The Friendship
“The Schooner Café.” He also mentions the pharmacy which Doc Law ran, right next to the bar. (The wall between them has been broken down now, and the extra space is sometimes used for dancing.)
Doc Law spent most of the daytime in the pharmacy, drunk. His drugs looked as if they had aged to mere dust in their glass jars. Christopher used to say that one could have gone in there and swallowed spoonfuls from all the jars marked “poison” without coming to the slightest harm. Here are two items about Doc from the notebook [mentioned pp. 14‒15, 21, 25] (date unknown): Doc Law, on the oil strike in New York: “They’re a long way from Christ.” . . . I go to Doc Law to plead for some toilet paper, during the shortage. Doc is in a good mood. He is printing an announcement––
something about “a large assortment”––on a long roll of paper, with a rubber stamp and a ruler to keep the letters in line. “Sure,” he answers, “you can wipe your ass with me any time you want to, kid.”
¾ 1945 ¾
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which they would return with whispered gossip. The place had
already become well known to columnists; there would be at least one movie celebrity among the customers nearly every evening. The chief attraction was Jay’s rich gooey French food. And the dimness of the lighting and the depth of the alcoves appealed to well-known people who wanted privacy. I remember much gossip about Charles Laughton’s visits there with young men. Jay was a perfect host. He knew how to recognize and flatter without making an indiscreet fuss.
On August 14, Japan accepted the Allied terms of surrender. I can’t remember if this was the day on which gasoline rationing was
officially stopped, but I do remember a great outburst of automobile driving––just driving for driving’s sake––about this time. The result was that the Coast Highway was littered with black chunks of
wartime recap rubber which flew off people’s tires as soon as they started speeding.
On August 23, Christopher finally moved his things out of the Vedanta Center and into the chauffeur’s apartment (so called) which adjoined the house the Beesleys were living in, on the Coast
Highway. It was understood that this was to be only a short visit, for Christopher was already planning to set up housekeeping with
Caskey in the near future. (I don’t remember any farewell scene with Swami, and I have no doubt that Christopher did everything he could to make their parting seem temporary and without any
particular significance.)
“The chauffeur’s apartment” was simply a bedroom and a
bathroom. It was right on the highway and the rumble and rattle of trucks at night would have been hard to get used to if it hadn’t been balanced and thus cancelled out by the roar of the waves on the shingle. Christopher found it very snug and he revelled in its complete privacy; it was altogether separate from the house and no noise he could have made would have been loud enough to reach the Beesleys’ ears or make their dogs bark. He could even go in
swimming after dark without their seeing him. What a change, after two and a half years of semipublic community life!
Caskey and Christopher now saw each other nearly every day and often Caskey stayed the night at the chauffeur’s apartment. They spent a lot of time together with Denny, Johnny Goodwin, Hayden Lewis and the Beesleys. (The Beesleys liked Caskey and Denny; Johnny and Hayden they saw only very seldom.) Caskey also met Peggy Kiskadden, Iris Tree and Vernon. As far as I remember, Peggy behaved quite graciously, though she did momentarily enrage
Christopher by bitchily pretending to think that Caskey was the 46
Lost Years
reason why Christopher had left the Vedanta Center. (She knew perfectly well that this wasn’t true, for Christopher had told her repeatedly that he was going to leave, long before Caskey had even arrived in California.) Iris welcomed Caskey without reservations, as she welcomed all her friends’ lovers, and they remained on good terms thenceforward. Vernon, now a confirmed heterosexual,
endorsed this new affair of Christopher’s with condescending amusement, saying, “He’s about your speed.”
On September 21, Christopher finished work at Warner’s
(apparently) and celebrated this by buying a secondhand Lincoln Zephyr convertible, a flashy car which was much better suited than the Packard1 to his show-off role of Uncle to the Denny–
Johnny–Caskey gang. One amusing quirk of the Lincoln was that its speedometer would get out of whack at high speeds; if you were doing 80, it would sometimes climb to 110. When this happened with Denny on board, he would pretend that they were all a bunch of pleasure-mad teenagers of the 1920s, drunk on bathtub gin, and yell “Let ’er rip!” and “Flaming youth!”
On September 25, Christopher was called back to Warner’s, but only for a few days’ work; there was some polishing to be done on the Up at the Villa script. On September 29, it was finished.
This was also the day on which Denny left for New York––the
day-to-day diary notes that he did so “by air,” this being still regarded as a chic and rather daring way to travel.2 Christopher and Caskey took over his apartment from him, moving in that same day.
Christopher never returned to the apartment at the Beesleys’.
Also on the 29th, a visit to a Dr. Williams is mentioned. I think 1 Christopher didn’t trade the Packard in, when he bought the Zephyr. The allowance on it would anyhow have been tiny. Instead, he decided to give it to Hayden Lewis––thereby pleasing and greatly impressing Caskey, as was his intention. This started a tradition, that the Packard must always be given away; to sell it would bring terribly bad luck. And so, during the next few years, the Packard changed owners for free at least half a dozen times. It was a very tough car and lived long.