Armen Kazazian | Gold / 2005

heart of gold

by Douglas Messerli

 

Armen Kazazian (screenwriter and director) Gold / 2005 [16 minutes]

The “kept boy” of Canadian director Armen Kazazian’s 2005 Gold, Jay (PJ Laic) is asked by his elderly lover, the now blind artist Calvin (Aron Tager) to paint under his careful instructions of where and how to place and push the brush across the canvas. It is a grueling and quite impossible task, particularly for a young street boy who has learned nothing about art in his youth, and given the fact, moreover, that Calvin is painting through his lover’s eyes simply out of need, a sense of pleasure which the boy cannot share, with no intention of selling the works.    

     The artist’s temper, moreover, is nearly impossible to deal with, and when Jay complains, Calvin’s only reaction is a further threat. It is a relief when the boy is sent off for cigarettes. He also stops by to pick some art supplies, where a young painter working in the store extols the wonder of Cal’s paintings, pointing to a new hardback edition of a book of the artist’s paintings.

   The young artist complains that he can never succeed in attaining the vision of Jay’s artist friend, to which Jay simply and quite innocently suggests that he should perhaps get his “own vision,” a viewpoint mocked by the would-be artist, Barry (Darryn Lucio), who suggests Jay stick to what he knows best, demeaning his role as Calvin’s gigolo, which seems to be knowledge shared by the whole city.

     Hurt, Jay cannot resist joining up for a few moments with an old street friend, Ken (D. Garnet Harding, who also performed in Greg Atkins’ Build of a year earlier) who stands at his usual corner, sharing a few snorts of cocaine and a good fuck. Ken admits that before Jay, he was Cal’s sweetheart and he can’t understand why Jay doesn’t take advantage of the blind old man, after all accidents do happen. His paintings must be worth a fortune. He brags of having stolen the wallet of a john who Jay knows as a kind man who pays well. It is apparent that Jay is disturbed by his former street-friend’s suggestions.

      When he leaves Ken’s apartment and returns to the corner, a car slows down and he, almost by rote, gets in, picking up a man for suck as in the old days. Clearly Jay is conflicted and can’t resist returning, at moments, to his old ways.

     But he does finally arrive back at Cal’s with the packages. Cal knows where he’s been and is angry, but is so anxious to continue the painting that he can hardly take the time out to reprimand his lover. As Jay again takes up the brush, he insists he can’t, that Cal find someone else, but the old man insists he needs only Cal, and together they make another painting; Cal holds Jay’s hand, guiding it to the center of the canvas where he puts a large daube of red paint that drips slowly down the canvas. “Bleeding, it’s called bleeding,” Cal purrs into Jay’s ear, his head almost resting on the boy’s shoulder, shuddering with pleasure in what might almost pass for an orgasm. Art is clearly necessary to his life, and Jay is willing and being paid to help him find it.

     As they move up the stairs soon after to put Cal to bed, the artist admits that he only paints to feel, that all Jay needs to do as well is to “feel.” He brings him near to kiss him, but falls back against the banister, for a moment making it appear as if Jay might indeed to be playing out his friend’s scenario. But Jay pulls him back.

     As the boy pulls him close almost in tears, Cal asks why he does “this” to himself, that he’ll take care him, he doesn’t need to worry, suggesting that he has already sent up a financial support for the boy. The vague referent presumably refers to Cal’s continued backsliding into prostitution, Jay pleading that he feels “so fucking old.” “You’re damaged, that’s all,” Cal insists. “You just have to heal. I healed. You will too. You just have to try.”

     Suddenly he asks the boy, “What color is your hair?” Jay mutters, “Brown.” “What color are your eyes?” “Brown.” “What color is your heart?” Jay smiles, kissing the artist. “Jay, what color is your heart?” From rote, apparently a kind of litany they have exchanged before, Jay whispers, “Gold.” “That’s right,” Cal concludes. Obviously in Jay he has found the fabled prostitute with a heart of gold.

 

Los Angeles, March 27, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).

 

 

Bastian Schweitzer | Gigolo / 2005

the whore

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bastian Schweitzer (screenwriter and director) Gigolo / 2005 [15 minutes]

 

Karim (Salim Kéchiouche) is a gigolo for a wealthy unnamed Parisian female (Amanda Lear) who is growing increasingly frustrated with his brooding silences and calculated lies. Even in his diaristic correspondence the good-looking Karim writes “Trust no one. Don’t say anything. Talk to no one. Conceal everything.”

    Although he claims to be a former Egyptian boxer he is really, so she has uncovered, Algerian. She doesn’t mind that, but the lies, his refusal to speak, to talk about his past finally has lead her to the realization that her dream of having a youthful lover that might bring out her own beauty is over. As she confides to a telephone correspondent, “Karim must go.”

     Yet we see the situation also from Karim’s eyes, learn of his increasing frustration of being a plaything for wealthy individuals and his growing his anger for even having come to Paris. On the side, we quickly discern, Karim is also being paid by an equally wealthy male (Stéphane Rolland) to be his lover, to make high-class semi-porn movies, and to serve his purposes as well.

 

    At other moments, we see Karim getting fucked by toughs under Paris bridges. And we gradually learn something about his own childhood, how his mother, a prostitute herself, left him, and how he was used as a male prostitute back in Algeria as well. He describes himself, through his Paris life, as being no one but a whore, a dog who has learned to bite.

    French-speaking Swiss director Bastian Schweitzer’s film hands us a firecracker about to explode. The melodramatic situation he has created, in fact, does finally break Karim apart, as he is forced to leave both of his wealthy supporters and attempts in a long drug-induced period of a few days to spill out his memories and feelings in the form of a vast apologetic letter to the woman for who he could not be the lover she desired, and who apparently he most desired to please.

     Schweitzer’s work, although beautifully filmed, is far too psychologically explanatory and sentimental for my taste, but reminds us that there are individuals trapped within a world of sexual relationships not entirely of their own making. If nothing else, the director provides with a quick glimpse of the underbelly of the privileged world of Parisian wealth in the early 21st century.

 

Los Angeles, March 27, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).

 

Joachim Back | The New Tenants / 2009

dancing

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anders Thomas Jensen and David Rakoff (screenplay, adapted from Jensen’s original Danish short film De Nye Lejere), Joachim Back (director) The New Tenants / 2009 [21 minutes]

 

Almost as if David Mamet were attempting to write a play in the style of Harold Pinter, Joachim Back’s 2009 dramatic comedy begins with a long harangue by Frank (David Rakoff)—as he sits across a small table from Peter (Jamie Harold)—concerning the terrible world we live in including mass shootings, meaningless deaths, etc., all of which, he argues, none of us can properly assimilate. We assume that before death we can make sense of things, but we all disappear with kind of whimper and a desperate cry out that death has come too soon.

   Peter is attempting to consume a lunch of shish kabob, but finds I difficult to eat given all of the smoke coming from Frank’s cigarette. They are clearly opposites, the one quiet, patient, Peter, dressed in a white T-shirt, the other, Frank, garbed in a beanie hat, scarf, and coat as if he were freezing on an icy street, with a demeanor that suggests he might be trying to channel Peter Falk. They can hardly bear each other’s company, yet here they sit, a gay couple, we soon find out, who have just moved into this apartment.

     Jeffrey Bowers, writing in the online magazine Vice nicely summarizes the situation:

 

“The tenants are an ‘opposites attract’ gay couple—Frank (writer/actor David Rakoff) and Peter (Jamie Harold). Frank, is a chain-smoking, world class loather who can’t stop ranting about life’s insignificance to his annoyed, yet caring lover. Peter, playing the film’s only caring character, is in for quite a ride when the apartment’s burdens literally come knocking on the door. First to arrive is a mad make-uped Grandma desperately seeking flour for a cinnamon bun recipe being baked for her granddaughter.”

 

     Frank, who answers the door, responds with the straight-faced jocular manner answering the old woman’s request that his relationship to flour is “not all it could be” due to not having baked since 1987. Perhaps she might try the couple who live below them.

     Delighted to share the gossip, she explains since they were shot; well, Jerry, the previous tenant who lived in their apartment was shot and when they came to see what all the noise was about, they too were killed. Didn’t he know that? Jerry comments that they hadn’t been apprised of terrible event when they signed for the apartment.

     Peter suddenly appears with a plastic bag of flour he has found in the kitchen cabinet, left we soon discover, by the previous tenant, finally sending Grandma (Hannah Hanft) on her way.

     It that same cupboard, Peter has also found some potato chips which he now begins to chow down, despite the odious cigarette fumes that once more make their way toward his nose and throat.

     Yet they hardly get another moment alone before the there is again a knock at the door, this time Peter answering it, as a rather obese man, Jan (Vincent D’Onofrio) pushes his way in, armed with a crowbar. He’s out to seek revenge on Jerry, who has evidently been seeing his wife Irene, whose mother, so it seems, is also the “Grandma” next door.

     When the astounded couple explain that they have just moved in and have never seen or even known of Irene, the sad husband sits and, with tears alternately flowing between bouts of further anger, briefly bleats out the sad tale of his wife’s unfaithfulness and her refusal to even let him touch her.

     But with another knock on the door, he again raises the crowbar into the air, and goes to face what he apparently believes is the miscreant with whom his wife cheated. He is immediately shot and killed by the newcomer, a local drug dealer Zelko (Kevin Corrigan) who perhaps was the man who killed Jerry and the couple downstairs. Pulling in Jan’s dead body, he demands to know if they’ve, by chance, found the bag of heroin for which Jerry still owes him.

      What else can the new tenants do but to deny any knowledge of such a bag, despite the fact that Zelko has noted their very brief contact of eyes in recognition of what was actually in the cupboard. He is ready to do them in as well and look around the place for himself. That is, until Grandma knocks loudly at their door, complaining even more she makes contact with them about the contents of the flour they have loaned her for her Cinnamon buns.

       Zelko shoots her dead through the door, opens it, and drags her body into the apartment to join Jan’s corpse.

       Do they know how much they now owe him, given the fact, as he perceives, they have handed over the heroin to Grandma? Cowering as he raises the gun, another interloper opens the door and conks Zelko with the crowbar over the head as he too joins the duo on the floor.

       She is the faithless Irene (Liane Balaban), now stoned out of her head. She curls up on the couch, recognizing her husband on the floor as well as her Grandma before she falls into a deep sleep from which she may not ever awaken.

       After a moment of absolute quietude and surely shocked relief, Frank takes out two cigarettes, lights them, and hands one to Peter, who this time readily puts it to his mouth. The two stand, move toward one another, reaching out to hold hands as they take each other their arms, slowly moving into a dance that takes them out into the hall and out of the building, dancing, dancing as a recipe for “Cinnamon Buns” scrolls down the screen before the credits. These two gay men have just escaped their abode where now 7 corpses have been left behind, all in the name of love and drugs. One might argue that in this short film, unlike Vito Russo’s theory that in Hollywood movies the gays must die, the only ones to survive are the queers, the sanest of species.

      This film won the Best Live Action Short at the 82nd Academy Awards, which is somewhat surprising, given that except for the strange camera aspect ratio of 2.35 : 1, making for a very narrow screen in which the action is shot up most close that primarily results in a sense of intense claustrophobia, this production, nonetheless, smells entirely of greasepaint and stage boards.

 

Los Angeles, October 6, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

Roberto Fiesco | Actos impuros (Unclean Acts) aka Lewd Acts / 1993

toward the light

by Douglas Messerli

 

Julián Hernández and Roberto Fiesco (screenplay), Roberto Fiesco (director) Actos impuros (Unclean Acts) aka Lewd Acts / 1993

Robert Fiesco's first film, Actos impuros (1993), translated alternately as Unclean Acts or Lewd Acts ( prefer the latter) is a highly disturbing but utterly beautiful film. In some respects, it is not even a coherent narrative, but is a series of "acts," just as its title suggests, that have no real explanation.

     Julián Hernández’s script was based, reportedly, on “el estrangulador de Tacuba,” the 1942 Mexico City strangler who lived in the Tucuba district, Gregorio Cádenas. Yet Cádenas who killed four women, at least one with whom he had sex, strangled no men, and certainly was not the handsome Lucifer-like figure like Oscar (Oscar Trejo Lara) who stokes the fires for the baths in which he works. Unlike Cádenas, moreover, who presumably suffered from a possessive mother which, according to the psychiatrists of the day, led him to hate women, this murderer knives and strangles men and women equally without any apparent reason.

     We do see him having difficulty completing sexual intercourse with the neighboring woman, Leticia (Yoatizin Hernandez), someone to whom he is clearly attracted, particularly since he takes her to a local carnival and, before sex, briefly dances with her (a favorite tool of sexual seduction in Fiesco’s films), their reflection captured in a mirror almost as if it were a TV set. And we can imagine that he kills the male showering in the baths—a murder we never actually see him commit, only perceiving that he has done so by his cries as he digs the knife he apparently used into the walls of his apartment building—due to his apparent attraction to him as he watches, again in a mirror showing the water dripping down the attractive stranger’s naked torso, a scene that, as film commentator Rick Powell has observed, João Pedro Rodrigues might have borrowed for his O Fantasma. Clearly this would-be macho figure is somewhat sexually confused. And we can speculate that he lashes out when he discovers himself precisely in that state of mind.

     But this is simply speculation. Oscar is a loner, without any clues around him to suggest his past, future, or even present. When not in bed or in the showers, his life is spent shoveling coals into the burner which keeps the showers hot.

      In fact, in this film, no one even seems to be aware of his killings. And the focus of this movie is not on the act of killing—we only note it when in the midst of his attempts of having sex with women, their hands and bodies fall slack. As I report above, we never even witness the male’s knifing.

     The real fascination of this film lies in the beauty of the working class building in which he lives, in the shadowed and dappled lights that reveal swaths of blues, reds, yellows, and, even more importantly, the beauty of his hairy brown buttocks in the midst of sex. Unlike Fiesco’s later short film, Trémolo (2015) where the director erases any sense of voyeurism in our observation of the handsome young male bodies, here we are purposely turned into voyeurs, wondering at all times whether Oscar can relieve his sexual frustrations or unable to, will strike out again. There is almost an element of sadomasochism involved, a suggestion that heterosexual sex and homosexual desire will almost always result in death, standard tropes of literature since the beginning of time.

      The beautiful landscapes with which we are presented—almost reminding me of a rawer version of the richly colored shades of the later films of Gregory Markopoulos—almost stabilize the violent sexual encounters we observe, as if the monster of this tale might only be able to balance himself by identifying with the landscape he might be able to calm down his demons.

     And in fact, something like that does seem to occur at the film’s end when, after killing the woman he most seemed to love, he throws away his knife, later “picking up” a male with whom he has sex. Their lovemaking is fairly ambiguous, and it is hard to tell whether or not he successfully ejaculates, although he does appear to do so. In any event, despite his hasty departure, he leaves the man he has just fucked alive, as the camera follows him down a heavily shadowed staircase moving out toward the light. Of course, we cannot know whether he has finally come to terms with his homosexuality or just grown tired, as apparently Cádenas did, of his horrendous acts. But the landscape, if nothing else, suggests a sort of resolution.

 

Los Angeles, November 27, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (November 2020).

Will Willoughby | Jerome Lawrence: Just Off Broadway / 1993

what my heart forgot to say

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jerome Lawrence (scenario), Will Willoughby (director) Jerome Lawrence: Just Off Broadway / 1993

 

Today, quite expectedly, I was sent a short film short by Will Willoughby of a very special performance I produced at New York City’s Algonquin hotel for playwright Jerome Lawrence from 1993.

       Perhaps this cannot properly be described as an LGBTQ film, but given that it’s a performative celebration of a gay man, directed and produced by gay men, and starring at least four homosexual performers, along with a great many gay men and women in the audience, I’d suggest this is interesting in the same way that the amateur film by the members of Los Angeles The Brownstone bar in Always on Sunday was or the way in the lesbian bar performances in Mona’s Candle Light are fascinating. 

       Yet I never imagined upon beginning the multi-year project of writing about LGBTQ films that I might have been involved directly in the creation of one of them. In order to describe that strange, circuitous route to LGBTQ filmmaking, I need first recount a series of friendships and events.

      Sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s my companion Howard N. Fox and I became acquainted, probably through Marjorie Perloff’s soirées, with Bill and Jeannie Fadiman. William Fadiman, who as a young college student at the University of Wisconsin had created the literary game “Poetic Posers,” published regularly in the New York Herald eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he married Jeannie and from the 1940s to the 1970s supervised script development at several major studios, including Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer (MGM), Radio-Keith-Orpheum Pictures (RKO), and later Columbia, working as the assistant to RKO and MGM Head of Production Dore Schary. Among Hollywood regulars it was known that to get to Schary you had to go through Fadiman.

     In 1970 he was hired as literary consultant at Warner Brothers-Seven Arts, and contributed regular book reviews to Warner Bros.-Seven Arts. He contributed book reviews to The New York Times Book Review, the New York Herald Tribune, Saturday Review, and the Nation. He also produced Bad for Each Other (1953), Jubal and The Last Frontier (both 1956), and Rampage (1963).

     The Fadimans invited us a few times to restaurant lunches and dinners at their house. At one point Bill asked me to read the manuscript for a novel he’d written, Shivering in the Sun. It wasn’t, to be honest, a particularly good work, written in a kind of noir style with a rather sleazy plot about Hollywood agents, a subject he knew well. But I did help him to get it published and distributed outside of the Sun & Moon imprint.

     At the party for the book’s publication, which, if I remember correctly, was held at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, I met his older brother Clifton—well known as a former editor at Simon & Schuster, the book review editor of The New Yorker, the literary judge for the Book of the Month Club, and, most notably as the radio and later CBS Television host of Information Please!—who, in turn, introduced me at the party to Jerome Lawrence.

      I knew very well who Jerry Lawrence was having read and seen several productions of stage and television versions of his and co-writer Robert E. Lee’s Inherit the Wind, Auntie Mame, and The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail. The very first Broadway theater ticket I bought was in 1969 for his and Lee’s (the latter to whom Jerry introduced before his death in 1994) Dear World a musical based on Jean Giraudoux's play The Madwoman of Chaillot with songs composed by Jerry Herman and starring Angela Lansbury (who won a Tony for her performance), Jane Connell, and Milo O’Shea.

     Soon after, Jerry invited me to attend an LAOpera production of The Makropulos Affair with him. And a few weeks later he asked me to lunch at his splendid Malibu home where I first met his assistant and later production executive for his and Lee’s work, Will Willoughby.

     Jerry and I talked briefly about Sun & Moon reissuing Auntie Mame or Inherit the Wind, but those discussions didn’t go far since his previous publisher were not ready to relinquish rights. Moreover, he was far more interested in my publishing his new novel, A Golden Circle. I read it and found it be quite charming, but it really didn’t present itself as a typical Sun & Moon title, devoted as we were to contemporary innovative writing, particularly international in perspective.It took me weeks of contemplation before I finally agreed to do it, mostly because of by sentimental attachment to his and Lee’s previous works.

     Little did I realize, however, that Jerry was the perfect author in that he had utterly no fear of self-promotion. He immediately arranged for a reading in Los Angeles for which he engaged actor Holland Taylor for a reading at Brentanos Bookstore in Century City; the event was sold out. And soon he came to me with the proposal to hold a huge celebration of his book in New York at the Oak Room of the famed Algonquin Hotel in which some of the novel’s events occurred, a sacred place that no longer exists.

     Given his long theatrical career and the fact that he was now approaching his 78th birthday, I think it saw it as not only an opportunity to promote his new publication, the beautiful book with the famed Gustav Klimt painting Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer on its cover, but to celebrate his own career. His idea was splendid, I felt, except for the outrageous expense that a poor, independent publisher like Sun & Moon could ill afford given the costs for renting the legendary Algonquin room, arranging for drinks and hors d'oeuvres for 50 or more guests, the flight, and room costs. In the end we decided to split the expenses, with the guest list and invited performers to be Jerry’s responsibility while the publicity, photographer, and personal traveling costs would be my tasks. Jerry quickly lined up a programme that might have led many Broadway producer to weep with joy while providing my editorial assistant and me with a list of invitations to mail out to a bevy of theater and social celebrities.

      I added some of my favorite New York poets and fiction writers and all of my New York-based playwrights, and, since I almost always ran into Eudora Welty every time I visited that hotel, when I spotted her sitting in the lobby, I invited her as well; she did not attend.*

     Jerry and I both arrived separately a few days before the event, staying in the Algonquin itself, I in the Thurber suite. The first night Jerry and I dined at Sardi’s, where actor Jack Klugman stopped by our table to greet Jerry. The second night we dined, with Michael Tilson Thomas and his companion/now husband Joshua Robison, the latter of whom was Jerry’s nephew. At the time Thomas was the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra and later became conduction for the San Francisco Symphony.

     We had arranged to hold this one-night Off-Broadway musical (on 44th Street, just off Broadway) to occur when theater celebrities might be in town to attend performances of the  nominees for the Tony Awards. tempting them with our own star-studded cast.

     After drinks and appetizers Bobby Short was to play a little piano music before I took the floor to introduce myself as the “producer” and to describe the event. I begin by telling them all how wonderful it was to see all my friends once more, although I had never before met most of them. But I knew them, I insisted, through having memorized the Burns-Mantle Playbooks back in Iowa since the age of nine or ten. I had imaginatively seen their every play and heard their music on recordings. I’m somewhat embarrassed now when I look back that I must have sounded a bit like the usual queer stagestruck kid. But they accepted it in good spirits. Besides, I’d paid for the dinks.

     It is at this point when director Will Willoughby’s film begins with two well-known theater legends, Michael Feinstein with composer Jerry Herman as his personal accompanist, taking over. Feinstein sang, appropriately from the musical Mame based on the Lawrence/Lee original play, songs he had just recorded for his album of The Jerry Herman Song Book. Why Feinstein felt he needed to change the pronoun of “If He Walked into My Life Today” to “she” I can’t explain. Obviously, he was uncomfortable with the suggestion that he might be singing a kind of love song about another male, but Mame was singing the song about her young nephew who she’d raised, not a torch song to an ex-lover, so I don’t comprehend the pretense of singing about a past romance.

     Over the few days of rehearsal, I’d gotten to know Feinstein, who hated early mornings and was often rather grumpy when having to arrive to the hotel to practice before noon. But after he had completely awakened he became a spirited and charming man who I grew to like.

     The great jazz pianist Bobby Short followed as Willoughby reveals in his film. Short begins with reporting that he and Lawrence share a friendship with Jean-Baptiste Adoue III (perhaps the son of the former mayor of Dallas) nicknamed Tad, who evidently strongly supported Short’s “pet project,” the Duke Ellington Memorial Fund. The song he plays in honor of both Tad and Jerry, is devoted to Ellington. During his performance Will’s camera pans over to catch me, beaming with joy while listening to Short’s music.

     From Chapter 9—which takes place in the very room in which occasion is located—E. G. Marshall, Jane Alexander, and Tony Randall now read from Lawrence’s A Golden Circle, Marshall playing Alexander Woollcott, Alexander performing as Rachel, and Randall mouthing all the other characters. Randall is particularly funny as Dorothy Parker, reacting to Woollcott’s suggestion that the actress use only her first name by snipping “it’s merely circumcising the superfluous.” The presiding member of the famed Algonquin Round Table also appears in Auntie Mame as the gentleman who taught Patrick Dennis how to properly serve gin and tonic. Jerry must have had a special fondness for him.

      Marshall was a long-time favorite actor of mine having played in Sidney Lumet’s 1957 film 12 Angry Men and for several years in the early 1960s starring in one of my favorite TV dramas, The Defenders. The day after this performance, Lawrence, Marshall, and I took a taxi across town to do a reading from A Golden Circle at the West Side Barnes & Noble bookstore. To my surprise my friend, poet Hannah Weiner, who I hadn’t seen in years, showed up to that reading.

      Jane Alexander had just that year temporarily given up her acting career to become President Clinton’s choice to head to National Endowment for the Arts.

       Randall, who was married twice to women, played the gay coded partner to Rock Hudson in several of Hudson’s films, the “friend” to whom Hudson turns time and again for comfort while battling with his various wives (often played by Doris Day) and girlfriends. Randall also played a kind of gay-coded figure in Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple acting the role of a man who was more at home in the kitchen and cleaning the house than interested in playing poker with the guys or trying to seduce the local twin sisters. In truth, Randall, despite being deeply closeted, was well-known in Broadway circles as being gay, and back in the days when it was fashionable, regularly threw gay-boy parties. But like Anthony Perkins and others, he longed to have children and entered late in his life into a heterosexual relationship with Heather Harlan, a woman he apparently loved with whom he had two children. He was married to his first wife, Florence Gibbs from 1938 to her death in 1992, the year prior to the Lawrence event. We still tend to think of sexual orientation as being a binary situation when it is often a fluid series of pushes and pulls in different sexual directions.

        Upon the completion of Lawrence’s text, there is great applause, but at this point, as I come forward to introduce more acts, the film inexplicably stops. Will assures me he has other footage from the event, so perhaps some day soon we shall have a more complete record of the Lawrence celebration.

        I believe the great flautist Paula Robison followed. One of the founding members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Robison played annual concerts for 30 years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also giving regular performances at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. At the time of this performance Robison had teamed up with Brazilian performers, playing in a trio with Cyro Baptista and Romero Lubambo to create what she described as “Mistera Nova.” They went on to perform together for 10 years. More recently she has recorded major works by Arnold Schoenberg and Morton Feldman. She is Joshua Robison’s sister and Jerry Lawrence’s niece.

        Michael Feinstein returned to play and sing more musical  standards, in the midst of which he invited a member of the audience, the legendary composer Burton Lane, to perform a couple of numbers. Lane, known not only for his great stage musicals Finian’s Rainbow and On Clear Day You Can See Forever, but for his contributions to over 30 movie musicals including Fred Astaire’s Royal Wedding, was also the one who first discovered Judy Garland. Finian’s Rainbow played a special role in my youth as I performed in it in high school and later at the University of Wisconsin as a chorus member and dancer. The musical director for the University of Wisconsin production was Vance George who would later work with Michael Tilson Thomas as Choral Director of the San Francisco Symphony.

       In the rather large gathering for the Jerome Lawrence: Just Off Broadway evening were playwright Robert Anderson (Tea and Sympathy), John Handzlik (the original actor who played Patrick Dennis as a young boy in Auntie Mame), poet Charles Bernstein and artist Susan Bee, playwright Mac Wellman, actor Michael York, restaurateur Vincent Sardi, Jr., playwright Len Jenkin, actor Marian Seldes, playwright Jeffrey Jones, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, orchestra manager Joshua Robison, and a large number of other celebrity figures which my now elderly mind has wiped away from my memory, alas. I do recall that just before going on stage, fiction writers Wendy Walker and Tom LaFarge called me to say they were unable to attend.

       Also in the audience was a woman who I had sat next to in the airplane on my trip from Los Angeles to New York. Discovering that she was making her regular semi-annual pilgrimage to see New York theater, I whimsically invited her to the Lawrence special. At the end of the evening I asked what she thought about the presentation. “It’s the best play on Broadway, I swear” she intoned, shaking her head in wonderment of the experience. I had the same feeling; maybe we should have moved the whole piece over just a couple of blocks the next night and begun a Broadway stint.

        I never had the opportunity to tell Jerry that and how much his special celebration had meant to me. And until I received the short film from Will this morning, I had only vague memories to remind me of that special evening. I had hired a photographer, who you see snapping shots in the film who sent us negatives, which I passed on to Jerry and Will, waiting for their decision on which ones and how many we should order. That week Jerome Lawrence’s lovely mansion went up in the flames of the 1993 Malibu Canyon fires, taking the only negatives with them. In the months and years following, Jerry became increasingly ill, and although we did another few readings in Los Angeles (one special event in Malibu with performers Martha Scott, Burgess Meredith, Jerry and Will and Carol Channing in attendance), I didn’t seem him much after that. And suddenly today I was reminded of Jerry Herman’s closing lines from “If He Walked into My Life Today”:

 

                              And there must have been a million things

                              That my heart forgot to say

                              Would I think of one or two

                              If he walked into my life today?    

 

I hope I’d immediately shout out, “Thanks for the memories, Jerry,” just as I must thank Will for helping me to sustain them.

 

*I wrote my Master’s thesis on Eudora Welty, several chapters of which were later published in academic journals. Accordingly, I attended a couple of conferences on Welty’s work, one at William and Mary College where I first met Welty. Over the years, consequently, Welty had come to know me at sight, although I’m not sure what she thought about my publishing activities. At one point she greeted me with the words, “Oh, yes, you’re the one man that edit’s that strange little magazine.” Why Sun & Moon was strange or, at over 250 pages, why it might be defined as “little” I can’t explain, but obviously it didn’t meet with her more conservative Southern values. And by 1993, of course, I had moved quite far away from the context in which her writing existed, although I still very much admire everything she wrote.

 

Los Angeles, April 22, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (April 2021).