Ivan Moffat––Iris Tree’s son by her American husband––came
back from the war about this time, to start working on films in Hollywood with George Stevens. He had just married a girl named Natasha [Sorokine] who had lived for some time with Sartre and 1 For some reason which I can’t recall, Christopher associated this song particularly with Caskey. Another Caskey theme song, in Christopher’s mind, was “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”
[* “Seascape, with Frieze of Girls” from C. K. Scott Moncrieff ’s 1924 translation, vol. 2.]
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Simone de Beauvoir, as a sort of erotic stepdaughter.1 Natasha was Franco-Russian, large and beautiful and sulky; later she became lively and crazy and a public nuisance. Ivan was then extremely cute and very like Dirk Bogarde. More about them both later.
Michael Hall. He was then an actor, in his early twenties, pretty in a sly, sugary way, almost certainly Jewish though he wouldn’t admit it. 1946 was the year in which he appeared as the son of Fredric March, in The Best Years of Our Lives. Michael didn’t do anything to distinguish himself in the picture. He continued to act after this but never with much success. Later he became an extraordinarily successful, almost clairvoyant collector and seller of antiques; he could find real treasures in a thrift shop. . . . Christopher met him at a party sometime in the winter of 1945–1946. Michael made a dead set at Christopher, coming up to him and murmuring, “I’m extraordinarily attracted.” (Christopher later heard that Jay de Laval had encouraged Michael to do this, presumably because Jay still owed Caskey a grudge for walking out on him.) Caskey was present at the party, I think, but he certainly didn’t mind. Michael’s friend (I forget his name) was present also, and did. Christopher knew he was
behaving badly, but Michael’s attention flattered him, and he took Michael back to the Entrada Drive apartment. When they got there, Christopher found he hadn’t a key. Michael climbed in through the fanlight and opened the door, a feat which appealed to Christopher as being sexily athletic. Michael had a plump, creamy white,
extremely fuckable body. [. . .] they had an enjoyable time together.
And Christopher continued to have sex with Michael from time to time, good-humoredly and without emotional involvement, for
about twenty years [. . .].
Lennie Newman. He made his appearance in the Canyon, as Jay’s boyfriend, sometime in 1946. He was small, blond, cute, full of giggles and screams, a hard worker, a hard drinker, a defector from the Mormons in Utah. Everybody liked him. He had absolutely
honest bleary blue eyes and was so naturally friendly that he even got along with the cops; they didn’t arrest him when they caught him driving drunk. Jay took him on as assistant chef at the restaurant and taught him all his secret sauces. Lennie was probably the only one of Jay’s “lovers” who really loved him.
1 Simone de Beauvoir had been one of Natasha’s professors at a college, when Natasha was seventeen or eighteen. Natasha, who could be very witty at times, later described her as “an alarm clock inside a frigidaire.” De Beauvoir can’t have been all that frigid, however, for she had had an affair with Natasha before passing her on to Sartre.
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Lost Years
Katherine Anne Porter. I am very vague about dates here but it seems to me that Christopher and Caskey got to know her while they were still at Entrada Drive. Perhaps she was visiting Los Angeles because of some projected movie. The image she presented was that of a senior southern belle (she would have been fifty-two), extremely gracious and rather ridiculously ladylike––her “beauty” and her
“breeding” were qualities to which she firmly laid claim and you had to accept them as real if you wanted to associate with her. Beneath these airs and graces, Christopher saw a tough coarse frontier woman, pushy, ambitious, fairly good-natured if handled with proper deference. Christopher and Caskey played up to her and for a while the three of them were almost friends. Katherine Anne treated them like favorite nephews; she even cooked meals for them. Unfortunately, however, beneath Christopher’s deference and flattery, there was a steadily growing aggression. By her implicit claim to be the equal of Katherine Mansfield and even Virginia Woolf, Katherine Anne had stirred up Christopher’s basic literary snobbery. How dare she, he began to mutter to himself, this vain old frump, this dressed-up cook in her arty finery, how dare she presume like this! And he imagined a grotesque scene in which he had to introduce her and somehow explain her to Virginia, Morgan and the others. . . . If Christopher hadn’t been drinking so much at this time, he would almost certainly have been able to hide his feelings from Katherine Anne––especially since he knew they were unreasonable and unkind to a middle-aged silly woman who had never done him any harm and who, after all, did have quite a bit of talent. But one evening his tongue got loose and out popped his aggression, accompanied by a drunken laugh: “You know who you are, Katherine Anne? You’re
the Joan of Arc of Texas!” Real, biting insults often have an element of impressionism in them; they convey far more than they actually say. Katherine Anne undoubtedly understood all the implications of Christopher’s phrase, with the mockery and contempt and hostility behind it. Her first reaction, however, was to treat it as a merely impertinent joke; she pulled Christopher’s hair hard, till he yelled.
(This reaction now seems to me rather sympathetic.) After this, they said goodnight––as they would have, anyway, for Christopher had spoken just as she was about to enter the house where she was staying. . . . Next day, Christopher apologized and tried to explain everything away, thereby making the situation worse. Katherine Anne never forgave him. Years later, when they were actually on the same college campus, she refused to meet him. Mutual friends urged her to pardon Christopher. She replied that she had even forgotten what it was that he had said––which may well have been true; what ¾ 1946 ¾
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she had not forgotten was what he had meant, and for that,
apparently, no pardon was possible. . . . Thus Katherine Anne became the first of an oddly assorted collection of people who, for various reasons, made up their minds that they would never see Christopher again. The others: Charlie Chaplin, Benjamin Britten, Cole Porter, Lincoln Kirstein.
Two other acquaintances of that period come to mind. I have
forgotten their names. What I remember about them relates to the nearly fatal auto accident in which they were both involved. I think it happened on New Year’s Eve––which would explain why they
were drunk enough to drive out onto the Coast Highway from West Channel Road without noticing that a truck was bearing down on them. (It seems incredible, now, but in those days there were no stoplights at the intersection, which must always have been
dangerous.) When they were brought into hospital, the doctors supposed that both men––I’ll call them A. and B.––were dead. Both responded to stimulants, however. A. had a broken neck and a
broken leg; B. had a fractured skull and several broken ribs. They needed transfusions, so Christopher and Caskey volunteered as blood donors. B. recovered fairly quickly, A. more slowly. When A. was convalescent, he asked Caskey to photograph him in drag––sitting up in bed wearing a picture hat, with a feather boa draped around the cast on his neck. Christopher greatly admired A. for doing this––he regarded it as conduct befitting a hero-queen. Years later, he seriously considered using this incident in The World in the Evening, when Stephen Monk is recovering from his accident. But it didn’t ring true. Stephen is no kind of a hero; he would be incapable of such behavior.
Sometime in the spring of 1946, Denny Fouts returned from New York. I don’t remember if he intended staying long on Entrada Drive; if he did, it is obvious that the apartment would have been too small for him, Caskey and Christopher, however harmoniously they might have been living together. But that problem didn’t arise, because Denny and Caskey started quarrelling almost at once, and so Caskey and Christopher had to get out. No doubt there was jealousy on both sides, chiefly on Denny’s. It must have irritated Denny to discover that Caskey and Christopher were now seriously involved with each other and that he had therefore lost most of his power as Christopher’s “Satan.” As for Caskey, he had probably sensed, from the beginning, that Denny regarded him with fundamental contempt