occupants, made a trap for any available sunshine on winter days; this was a perfect place for sunbathing. Since the beach was anyhow chiefly the domain of queers at that time of year, it was not surprising 1 The parrot may have been suggested to Christopher’s imagination by the
“parent–parrot” misunderstanding of the previous day. But it’s curious to remember, in this connection, Christopher’s vision of the parrotlike bird which is recorded on November 12, 1940 [in D 1].
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that the pits were used by them exclusively. Everybody was stark naked and many had erections. At your approach, heads emerged.
You took your pants or trunks off in full view of the audience. There wasn’t much privacy even in the bottom of a pit, for your neighbors were apt to peep over. If you weren’t a bit of an exhibitionist, this was the wrong spot for you.
It was quite the right spot for Christopher. Indeed, he enjoyed the exhibitionism more than the sex he got there. Much of this was with middle-aged men whom he wouldn’t have even considered under
any other circumstances. Only one memory remains of sex with an attractive young man; Christopher blew him, while several other people looked on.
The pleasures of exhibitionism were mildly spiced with risk; The Pits weren’t as sheltered as they seemed. They could be overlooked from the top of the wall. The Marion Davies beach house was then unoccupied, but gardeners looked after the plants in its yard and kept its swimming pool clean. At least one of these gardeners was both inquisitive and prudish. He would appear without warning on the wall––which bordered the pool––and yell abusively at anyone he saw making sex or even merely lying naked below. It was said that he had once called the police; a futile gesture––for of course his intended victims had run away long before they arrived.
Caskey had been told by Christopher of his visits to The Pits and made jokes about them with indulgent amusement. He would never have gone there himself––The Pits belonged in the category of Christopher’s immature sexual tastes. (Not that Caskey ever used the word “immature”; he probably didn’t even think it consciously. But he felt it, and his feeling was expressed by his behavior.) Christopher accepted Caskey’s attitude; I think he himself was embarrassed by his fondness for The Pits and covered this by talking of his visits to them as sexual slumming. Like Caskey, he called the pit occupants “Pit Queens,” without including himself. He and Caskey made up scenes for an imaginary movie: Pit Queen for a Day.1
Although there is no reference to Caskey’s photography in the 1945 day-to-day diary, it’s probable that he had started working at it before the year ended. Soon after he and Christopher had begun living together, Caskey decided to become a professional 1 According to Caskey (in a letter written twenty-five years later and therefore not absolutely to be relied on) The Pits had disappeared by the fall of 1948, when he and Christopher returned to California. Their site became part of the grounds of a beach club, which also owned the Marion Davies lot. Her beach house was torn down but her swimming pool is still in use.
¾ 1946 ¾
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photographer; it was one of those “good resolutions” you make on entering upon a new relationship or a new year. So Caskey took a course in developing, printing, enlarging, etc., and bought the necessary equipment. I believe the course was at Santa Monica City College and that it lasted about two months.
Christopher was surprised and delighted to discover that Caskey had a great deal of talent; everybody who saw his work––and that later included several famous photographers1—agreed that this was so. Soon he was taking portraits and doing all his own darkroom work, at home.
Among the people who came to the Entrada Drive apartment
during the spring of 1946 were:
George Platt Lynes. He took photographs of Caskey and
Christopher in the apartment and also amongst the big wooden piles on the beach near the Lighthouse Café.
Bob Stagg, a friend of Caskey’s from the pre-navy New York days.
Bob was still in the navy and he was badly worried because he thought he might be sent out to the Marshall Islands for the A-bomb tests on Bikini Atoll which were to take place later that year. In those days nearly everybody except (?) the scientists believed that the results of an atomic explosion were quite unpredictable––maybe all the onlookers would be destroyed, maybe the Hawaiian Islands were in danger, maybe a tidal wave would travel clear across the Pacific and swamp Santa Monica. But Bob wasn’t sent to the tests after all.
He soon returned to civilian life, working as an architect in New York. He was a good-looking lazy friendly young man who drank a great deal.
Carlos McClendon and Dick Keate. They were the season’s most
attractive pair of lovers; both sweetly pretty boys. Carlos, though a blond, was partly Mexican and had a lot of Latin charm. Dick had been a major (I think)[*] in the air force and had flown many missions over Germany. (Christopher used to call him “The Angel of
Death.”) There was a story about his demobilization: Dick, while still in uniform, used to frequent the bar of the Biltmore Hotel,
downtown,[†] and was accustomed to be treated by the bartenders with the respect due to his rank and his combat ribbons. A short while after leaving the service, Dick returned to that same bar, wearing the [. . .] clothes which expressed his fun-loving peacetime personality. One of the bartenders, not recognizing him, exclaimed, 1 George Platt Lynes, Cartier-Bresson, Cecil Beaton, Horst.
[* He was a captain.]
[† Keate recalls it was the Hollywood Biltmore, not the one in downtown Los Angeles.]
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Lost Years
“Get that [kid] out of here!” and Dick was refused a drink. . . . Carlos and Dick were then very much in love––Carlos perhaps even more so than Dick––and they simply couldn’t keep their hands off each other for long. At a party, they [were inseparable].
(The word “party” reminds me of the songs people played on the record players of those days. There have been only two periods in Christopher’s life in which he was acutely song conscious, though for different reasons: his life with Caskey in 1945–1946, and his early life in Berlin. Christopher was aware of the Berlin songs of the thirties because they were in German, which he was eager to learn, and because they expressed for him the glamor of this city he had fallen in love with. He felt the glamor of the American songs also, but the effect they had on him was far more painful than pleasant. “It wouldn’t be make-believe / If you believed in me . . .” “My sweet embraceable you . . .” “Ev’ry time we say goodbye, / I die a little
. . .”1 Sinatra creating his tremendous pauses: “Why does its flight make us stop–––––in the night, and wish–––––as we all do?” Even today, I can recapture something of Christopher’s sensations as he heard them, a sweet but sickening sense of being bewitched, en-trapped, unable to escape. He wanted to escape from this party, these people, this life he was leading––the kind of life which these songs seemed to describe. Did he really want to? Yes, but not enough. For the songs were the incantation of a spell which made him helpless.
He hated them for that. And he copied into his commonplace book a passage from Proust which might have been written expressly to relieve his own resentment:
. . . these tunes . . . offered me their secrets, ogled me, came up to me with affected or vulgar movements, accosted me, caressed me as if I had suddenly become more seductive, more powerful and more rich; I indeed found in these tunes an element of cruelty; because any such thing as a disinterested feeling for beauty, a gleam of intelligence, was unknown to them; for them, physical pleasures alone existed. Within a Budding Grove. “Seascape.”[*])