Interviewed by Dylan Foley, at Vincent's friend's house on Grove Street in the West Village
(Vincent Virga and James McCourt, 1965)
The novelist and legendary photo
editor Vincent Virga was born at St. Vincent’s Hospital in 1941, and was raised
in Long Island City and Lindenhurst, Long Island. Vincent went to Bonaventure
University then to Yale Drama in 1964 to study acting. There he met James
McCourt, a writer also studying at Yale Drama.
Jimmy and Vincent became a couple in
1965 and left Yale to study acting in London during the “swinging Sixties.”
They immersed themselves in the post-war exploding theater scene seeing
performances by a young Maggie Smith, Alan Bates, Vanessa Redgrave, Peter
O’Toole, and Laurence Olivier, along with performances by the legendary Edith
Evans, Sybil Thorndyke, Michael Redgrave, Margaret Rutherford, and Celia
Johnson, among many others both in London and in rep-companies all over
England. An analyst once told Vincent that his relationship with Jimmy lasted
so long because they had a five-year honeymoon.
Thus began Vincent and Jimmy’s picaresque journey, moving from
London to New York, then back to London, then out to East Hampton, then into
the Gramercy Park neighborhood, and Washington D.C., as well as a rural house
outside, Ballina, Co. Mayo, Ireland and then into a restored 18th-century barn
on an estate, Enniscoe.
In London in the 1960’s, Jimmy wrote
and Vincent got work as a temp-typist, then would often end up running the
group he was working for. In one case, Vincent was working at the London Welsh
Association. The managers were horrible drunks, so after several months,
Vincent was running the association going from 5 pounds sterling to 50 pounds a
week. The same thing happened with a solicitor who offered to train him for the
British bar.
Vincent and Jimmy first moved back
to New York and wound up living on Mott Street, in the still-mean streets of
Little Italy. In a comical meeting set up by his ex-Mafia father, Vincent’s
residency in the area was approved by the local Mafia chieftain. Jimmy and
Vincent’s safety was assured.
In 1975, Jimmy’s opera satire Mawrdew
Czgowchwz was published by FSG, after the intervention of the writer and
social theorist Susan Sontag with Vincent’s instigation.
With no experience, Vincent lied
his way into a job as a photo editor for the right-wing actor John Wayne’s
“America, Why I Love Her.” He now has 163 picture inserts on his 8-page resume.
VINCENT VIRGA: Jimmy and I were walking home in the Village last
night from the NY Philharmonic. On Christopher Street, this gay guy came up to
us: “Because of you, I exist,” he said kissing each of us on our cheeks.
He was not sober but not drunk either. Dutch courage? He said that he was 50, but he looked like he
was 40.
(A young Jimmy McCourt)
My Aunt Mamie lived on 8th Avenue and
12th Street in Manhattan in a big mansion, now a gas station. My
mother was an orphan with Judy Costello in the Catholic Orphanage attached to
Cathedral High School. When it was time to leave the orphanage, Aunt Mamie, who
was the school nurse, took them in. It was a large private house. Aunt Judy
said, “We were the skivvies.” There was this huge Waterford crystal chandelier
in the foyer and a button on the wall that lowered it. On ladders, they spent a
day cleaning the crystals, dipping them one by one in vinegar.
There was also this massive oak staircase starting in the foyer
that had to be waxed step by step. I vividly remember that house and Mamie’s
foul-mouthed parrot. He flew in the open parlor window one day. Mamie swore he
had belonged to a sailor. He eventually flew out the same window one day. When
my father had a slip and got engaged with the Mafia again, my mother left him
and took me and my sister Julie to live with Mamie in that house.
All those memories of that house. Mamie’s unseen sister living
secluded in an upstairs room, and an unseen blind border on the top floor.
Jimmy Walker gave the house to her. She was his mistress.
Mamie came over with her sister from Ireland to marry this rich
American. The two girls came from a penniless, Anglo-Irish landed-gentry
family. The “lovers” had met in Ireland and she had agreed to marry him. He
returned to America and sent her and her sister the passage. On the ship, Mamie
met a man named O’Neill. She married him on the ship. When she arrived in New
York, she was Mamie O’Neill and the American was given the slip. In her
trousseau, was all this Irish lead-chrystal. The bowls in our New York
apartment belonged to Mamie and a Victorian umbrella pot, now our living room
lamp. Turns out, O’Neill was a terrible, falling down drunk. He sold all
Mamie’s silver and died of the drink. Mamie opened an Irish tea shop.
Jimmy Walker came into her shop and set her up in that house.
DYLAN FOLEY: Was she a nurse?
VV: She was so Irish. She was not a “nurse nurse.” She knew how to
put on a Band-Aid. It was Cathedral High School with the nuns. She somehow finagled
her way in and became the School Nurse.
So there was my mother and my “aunt,” but she was not really my
aunt. She actually became my second mother. My mother’s name was changed
because the nuns couldn’t pronounce it, so it was cut to Kelly. They called her
Francis Veronica Kelly. She was Greek. She eventually had her name legally
changed. When Jimmy first came to visit my family from Yale, he said, “I don’t
mean to be rude, but your mother is the oddest-looking Irishwoman I have ever
seen.”
Because she was Greek! She was slightly olive skinned. She had a
wide nose. One weekend I went home. I thought Judy Costello was my mother’s
sister. Never thought about the name difference. The phone rang and I picked it
up. This man asked, “Is Francis Kelagoupolos there?” I repeated the name and
said no. Judy ran screaming and grabbed the phone from me. “Francis,” she
screamed again, “It’s Frankie, your brother!” They had been separated in the
orphanage.
My grandfather was killed in World War I, my grandmother died in
the influenza epidemic. With both parents dead, my mother wound up with a Greek
uncle who owned a diner. He took all the money that had been left to my mother
and put her in the orphanage. Her brother Frankie was immediately adopted.
Everybody wanted boys. He went into the Army. There he was on the phone decades
later. That’s how I found out she was Greek. That’s how I found out I had an
uncle. That’s how I found out Judy was not her sister. Judy had an entire
family of her own, an entire other life. My mother was the real love of Judy’s
life. She never married. My analyst once told me that Gaywyck with all
its secrets was the best autobiography he ever read!
My father was beyond beautiful. My mother was working in a
publishing house, McMillan. My father was a truck driver. One afternoon, after
having made his deliveries, he sat on my mother’s desk. He said to my mother,
“I’m going to marry you.” My mother said, “If that isn’t the silliest line I’ve
ever heard.” Then he left. The other women came over. “He’s a wonderful man,
Philly.” He asked her out. He went and picked her up at that mansion she was
living in to take her out to dinner. Mamie sent Judy with them. They went to an
Italian restaurant. Judy slipped him money for her share. My Dad loved her for
it. He was living on Mott Street.
DF: Where did your father come from?
VV: Sicily. He may have been three or four when he came here. He
said he remembered seeing the Statue of Liberty from his father’s arms. He had
a twin who fell off a roof and died. The family romance is that my grandparents
brought their five kids to the U.S. My father was the only boy of five
children. When my grandfather, an impoverished Italian count, realized that the
streets were not paved with gold, my grandfather and grandmother went back to
Italy, leaving the children in the care of the oldest daughter. Supposedly, he
died at 90 after being kicked by a mule, but he died happy having had sex the
night before. She raised the kids and that’s what we were told. I recently
found out this isn’t true. I found the truth in a photograph.
(Original cover for Jimmy McCourt's
Mawrdew Czgowchwz)
My father was introduced to a Mafia Don by his father. He was
“looked after” by this Mafia don. My father never finished high school. He
wanted to become a drummer. He was taken into the family of the Don. They were
the Palacinos of the D’Angelo family. They were based in Bensonhurst. They were
one of the five families. The least known family. They did all the shit that
their kind does, but there were a lot of problems. The Don drew the lines at
drugs. My father was going to become a made-man and a bodyguard. He turned out
to be a disaster. He was too gentle. He was emotionally attached to the family
and he was gorgeous. There was this daughter. They eloped.
The family romance has it that when they got to New Jersey, they
were protected by an enemy of the Don. They had two kids, then she died of
lupus, I think. Josephine, my half-sister, was five or six, when her mother
died. My half-brother. Phil or “Sonny,” was three years older.
I first lived on 6th Avenue and
17th Street, in Manhattan, which is why I was born in St. Vincent’s.
My mother was terribly constipated near the end of her pregnancy. She called
Mamie and was told to take two tablespoons of Bicarbonate of Soda. A few
minutes later, Mamie called back and corrected her prescription to two
teaspoons. Too late! When my mother went into labor with me, she was rushed by
ambulance to the hospital close by. When she came to, she asked “Where am I?”
The nurse/nun told her, “You are at St. Vincent’s.” Now my mother was an
orphan, remember. St. Vincent de Paul is the patron saint of orphans. She
thought it was God’s will, so she called me Vincent. That is where I went to my
first Twelve Step meeting, at St. Vincent’s, on my birthday, 43 years ago. I
went to find out how to make Jimmy stop drinking. He was falling apart. He was
in the third stage of alcoholism.
DF: Was that when Jimmy became sober?
VV: No. He’s just had his 40th year of
sobriety. After I was in the program for two years, he became sober in East
Hampton. Then he went out. He spent a year out and nearly died again. It turns
out, and they talk about it a lot in the rooms, people are expected to have one
relapse. You feel better and you think that you can control it. It was
horrible. It was a snowy winter. I was alone in a friend’s house in Sagaponack,
on Long Island, finishing my second novel, A Comfortable Corner. It’s
about recovery from alcoholism from the point of view of the non-alcoholic, the
partner in the disease. It’s called a “disease” because it has symptoms. Corner
was published during the AIDS epidemic and became very popular in the
Twelve Step rooms. It totally blew my anonymity. It also got me invited to
hospital rooms and funeral homes, which devastated me. I would faint. My
analyst told me I was having the correct response. I still suffer from PTSD
from that period of my life. I also became a tad reclusive with a touch of agoraphobia,
which my mother had most of her life.
DF: Why did your father’s first wife flee the Mafia life? Why did
she not want to take advantage of the wealth?
VV: She hated it. She faced an arranged marriage, like in
the Italian Renaissance, to solidify Family ties. She hated the whole scene,
hated it. My father was a very gentle man. He didn’t like carrying the guns or
any of that shit. When they were going out on their shticks [jobs], they didn’t
want him because he was too timid, not even as a driver. She fell in love with
him. She wanted out. He never would have become a made man. Her sister Anna
encouraged her. Anna became a beautician and invented Marilyn Monroe’s hair
color. Her apartment in Brooklyn was decorated in the color of Marilyn’s hair.
It was a camp. There was a life-sized painting of Marilyn from Seven Year
Itch with the skirt blowing up over the fireplace. There were plastic
runners on the blond carpet. On one visit, I told my kid brother we were
walking on Marilyn’s scalp. It gave the poor guy nightmares,
My father ran numbers with Harold. He was one of the brothers, the
youngest. There was Joey, who went to Hollywood. He married Jack B. Warner’s
secretary. That’s why I have all those signed pictures of movie stars in the
apartment, ‘ To Vinnie.’ He was Jimmy Dean’s stuntman and bodyguard in Texas
where they were shooting Giant. Dean used to pick up really rough trade
and bring them back to the motel where the cast and crew were staying. He liked
to be burned with cigarettes. It was Joey’s job to make sure the face wasn’t
burned. They could deal with torso burns with make up, but they couldn’t deal
with face burns. I have a snapshot of Liz Taylor sitting on Joey’s lap. Jimmy
Dean is lighting her cigarette in the canvas chair next to them. Once when Joey
was visiting us on Long Island, Liz called the house and I answered the phone.
It was as exciting as when Mom’s brother Frankie called her for the first time.
The eldest brother John took over the family. He went to Las
Vegas. That’s in The Godfather. There are the families who went to Las
Vegas and the ones that dropped out because of the drugs and the prostitution.
Then the families opened to non-Sicilians and the minute they let the Latinos
in, that was the end of any form of honor system. When Jimmy was in the
hospital and I was in Sagaponack, his room mate was a Latino Mafia guy on the
lam for having thrown a baby out a window when the poor slob he was shaking
down didn’t have the money. I remember my Mom telling me The Godfather was
“pretty pictures of shit.” I could never watch The Sopranos. My
dad’s gumbahs [pals] were like the crowd in that show. They’d come to the house
to make tripe, which my Mom wouldn’t cook because it stinks and we would all go
out for the afternoon.
DF: Where did they settle?
VV: My parents married on the condition he never had anything to
do with the Mob again. There were the two kids. My sister Josephine was a
pisser. She was vulgar and spoiled rotten by her grandparents in Bensonhurst. I
adored her. My father’s family gave Phil and Fran an engagement party. They
were all living in Brooklyn. It was a house, like all Italian houses, with the
basement converted into a gigantic kitchen and dining room. Wall to wall
linoleum. There were two pictures on the wall—Mussolini and the Pope. All the
women had sent their gold to Mussolini. They had no wedding rings. Mamie was as
left wing as you could get. She named her dog Fala after FDR’s dog. She wanted
to set up a tent city in the backyard of the big house. She was out there feeding
people. She was deeply immersed in the New Deal.
She found herself in this basement with all these Italians and
Mussolini. My mother looked at the spread on a side-table and thought the
antipasto was the meal. Then they sat down. My Aunt Josie had been cooking all
day. She told Judy, ‘The butcher has been saving me eyes for the past week.”
Judy hadn’t a clue what she meant. Three huge pots were cooking pounds and
pounds of pasta. Another was full of bubbling red sauce. The classic Italian
meal. Except it was a wedding feast. They took the lid off the sauce pot and
there was the sheep’s head and all those eyes. It is very tricky cooking eyes,
because they melt. You cook them separately, just to a certain point, like a
soft-boiled egg. At the last minute, they are dropped into the sauce. They
float and are scooped out very quickly. The head was hoisted from the pot. The
butcher had split it. The brains were ready to be served with the sauce.
Uncle Paul is sitting beside my Mom. He was a small, muscular man
with a frog voice, married to my father’s sister, Josie. My mother nearly
fainted. He took her hand under the table. The family were all cheering the
sheep’s head. They started passing the food. He very carefully skimmed the
sauce pot and pretended to be taking out some brains, taking out some eyes.
Then he gave my mother this little bowl of pasta. No brains, no eyes. These
women were all very loving to my mother. They were all so happy. They were all
thrilled. But they all thought my mother was a fancy snob. And they thought my
Aunt Mamie was really something. They all assumed Fran was a rich princess.
There was always this thing about my mother being a family snob, always. She
was a Greek orphan in a world she did not understand. Only Paul got it from the
get-go.
We lived on 17th Street and
6th Avenue, in a brownstone. There was a fire across the street and
Mom saw someone jump. So we moved. We moved to the projects in Long Island
City, across from the U.N. It was during the war. Many of the men were not
there. My father was 4F. He had emphysema. He also had a split eardrum from a
fired gun. I took tap dancing lessons and would practice tapping up and down
the flights of stairs. The neighbors were baking cookies to shut up my shoes
since I couldn’t tap and eat at the same time. My appetite for meals was
over. Mom made me stop tapping except in the classes and on the subway
platforms while we were traveling to the class.
Years later, I was walking down 7th Street and a cop close to me
fired his gun over my head. Someone was robbing a store. I lost part of the
hearing in my ear.
(Jimmy and Vincent, 1970's)
We were in the [Long Island City] projects. My father was driving
a truck for Macy’s. One of his bosses had the bright idea, the perfect crime.
Dad began delivering furniture to nonexistent people. He got caught.
The FBI came to my mother in the projects. They were convinced my
father had rejoined The Family. He hadn’t. Dad was always on the lookout for a
quick buck.
My mother left my father. We went to live with Mamie in that big
house. My father swore that he would never do that again and they soon got back
together. I think the FBI put the fear of god in him. Decades later, when I was
working at The New York Review of Books, which is where I met Sontag, my
dad’s truck was heisted full of color TV sets. The FBI did a stakeout in front
of the Lindenhurst house and tapped his phone line. I remember his calling me
at The Review, where I was the typesetter, and telling the FBI guys to
get off the line because he was talking to me. I could hear them clicking off.
It was too bizarre.
But my father still ran numbers with Harold. Harold wasn’t too
swift. A sweet guy. He wanted to be a dancer. He came in second at a dance
competition at Roseland. The winner was the woman who went on to become Ginger
Rogers. Funny, I’ve always found her rather awkward with Fred.
One of the first dates my father took my mother on was to
Roseland. They came in third, but my mother had never danced before.
The things that convinced my mother she was going to marry this
guy she truly loved was that he was so kind and he was such a good dancer. She
didn’t bargain on being forbidden to work. She loved him but she also loved her
job in publishing. My birth brought on her agoraphobia. I think she wanted to
run away, back to her life of freedom, so she unconsciously froze that desire
by making the outside world a threatening place. My mother could always tell my
father was working with Harold because he came home constipated. When the cops
chased Harold, he would go to the Varick Street garage where my father parked
his truck. And they would eat fistfuls of paper with the numbers on each piece.
Desperate!
When Harold died, Jimmy and I were living on Irving Place in a
brownstone, number 72, where I was the super under a false name. We had
returned to New York permanently for Jimmy’s work. My father called me and
said, “Harold died. Will you come with me? His body is at Old St. Patrick’s
Cathedral on Mott Street next to where you lived.”
The apartment building on Mott Street shared a wall with the
church. Behind the tenement building on the street had once been six small
apartment buildings only two stories high. All but one had been demolished. We
lived in the survivor for $17 a month with hot water only until midnight. Well,
the super was a drunk and we never had hot water so I called the city and a
small burner was put under our building and our rent went up to $32 a month,
Our bathroom window’s view was the empty lot that had once been the sixth
building and the stone wall. Across our courtyard was the tenement hallway and
the rear of a funeral home where there were never any funerals, only irregular
meetings with men in suits smoking cigars. We left it to go back to
London. It was our first New York return. At night, I was the youngest manager
for the Gollub Brothers checking coats and selling drinks in Broadway theaters.
Met a lot of remarkable people. Had a great experience with Ali at the height
of his glory at a performance of ‘The Great White Hope.’ He came up to my
refreshment stand, snatched an orange drink, grinned wickedly at me, and turned
to walk away to join his bodyguards. The show had started so we were the only
people around. I said, very politely, “Excuse me, sir I know you are the
greatest but the drink is still one dollar, please.” Well, he and his men
roared with laughter. He tossed me a twenty-dollar bill with an unforgettable
wink.
My father picked me up to go to the Cathedral and we drove
downtown. It was late, late, like one in the morning. There were occupied cars
double parked all around Old St. Patrick’s. We went in the front doors and this
guy said, “Hello Vinnie. Hello Philly.” St. Patrick’s was empty. Up in front,
there was a coffin and one large candle, and a man and a woman sitting in a
pew. There were all these men standing in the confessionals. They were the
bodyguards. The couple was Harold’s oldest brother, the Don, and his wife. At
the sight of us, he rose and rushed over and hugged my father and then me. The
wife said, “Vinnie, why do you use such big words in your novels? We can’t read
your books without a dictionary.” Now, we were talking about my gay novels.
Meanwhile, my father wouldn’t even mention them.
When Gaywick was published in 1980, I went to visit my
parents on Long Island. I never came out to them but I was living with
Jimmy since 1965, yet they always asked when I said I was planning to visit,
“Who’s minding the cat?” I would say, ‘Jimmy, I live with him.” One
morning, they were changing the radio station during lunch, rolled by NPR,
which they never listened to, and there I was on NPR talking about Gaywyck.
(Vincent's novel GAYWICK)
Liz Smith had discovered it and held it up on TV when she had her
gossip minutes on one of the news shows. She said, “This is the most wonderful
book.” She became very good friends with me. When I was working on some hot
biography as the picture person, she’d call me and ask me questions. I always
told her I could not tell her anything but she’d say, “Vin, I’ll ask you a
question and just stay silent if it’s a ‘yes.’ I’d laugh and start nattering
nonstop, which always made her laugh.
Richard Howard and David Alexander were driving across the country
when they heard me on NPR. He and David starting screaming with delight to hear
this gay guy talking about a gay gothic novel with church bells and scary
noises in the background on NPR.
So-called “serious” people were reading my romantic gothic send-up
of the genre, which I wrote to prove genres have no gender, and they didn’t
want to admit that they were loving it. We went to a party at James Merrill’s
apartment and David Jackson, Merrill’s partner, announced to the party that Gaywyck
saved his nephew’s life. Then James said quietly, “I really enjoyed it.’ He
never would have said it to me. I went to a party and Ashbery came sidling up
to me with his adorable grin and said. ‘That is a really lovely book.’ In an
Armenian restaurant, Tim Dlugos waved me over to congratulate me on it. When I
was doing Gerald Clark’s bio of Capote, he told me Truman used to read it every
Christmas out loud. There’s a sequence in the book that takes place at
Christmas 1899 followed by a New Year’s Eve scene because there was a whole new
world coming for the world and a whole new world coming for gay people. The
book is a game. The men speak lines from movies and books spoken by women in
films and books. Some guy in England did a master’s thesis on the book and the
game. He wrote and asked me to give him my ‘index’ of borrowed lines. He had
found quite a few, I remember. Mostly the famous ones, like ‘I’ve never seen so
many shirts!’ from Gatsby. And ‘No one’s ever called me ‘darling’
before,’ which Davis says in Now, Voyager. There are many of them. It
was fun making them part of the dialog in a natural way. And you know how it is
once you get started on a project: lines came at me in batches from the old
movies I’ve watched and the classics I read The Muse was obviously amused. In
fact, I was writing the book in a summer rental on the North Fork during the
New York City blackout. Stumped for a chapter ending, I put on the TV and there
was Irene Dunne being told by some bruiser to “fill every corner of her own
life” and not to depend on him. I flew back to my yellow pad--I write in
longhand, five drafts usually--and bingo, I had the ending for a chapter. Being
immersed in a project is like being in a state of grace for me.
The great review for the book was by Armistead Mauphin. He ended
the review, saying, ‘Read the son of the bitch. You’ll love it!’ That became
the tagline. People would come up to me and say quietly, ‘I loved the son of a
bitch.’
If you look at the original cover, it was designed to look like a
bodice ripper. They had to put warning signs up in bookstores. After I
worked with John Ehrlichman on his Watergate bio--I grew to love John--he
called me from some place Out There in Texas where he was on his book tour and
told me how he told all the stores to order Gaywyck, and how one bookstore
in Texas with the book in their window had a bullet shot into it
shattering the glass.
I got a very touching call in the middle of the night because I
was in the phonebook. Calling from a phone booth, this young guy asked me, ‘Is
your book true?’ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Is it true that a man can fall
in love with a man?’ ‘Yeah, I’m living with the man I love.’ ‘I was planning to
kill myself,’ he said, ‘because I’m in love with my gym teacher. I was planning
to kill myself but I was on line in the A + P checkout and there was your book.
I looked at it and I realized those were two men on the cover.’ He bought the
book. Before he hung up he said he would find some man to love who would love
him.
Avon was the publisher. It was rejected by everyone. [My agent] Elaine
Markson said forty publishers rejected it. She loved it and refused to give up.
I had a friend named Gwen Edelman. She was an editor at Avon.
Jimmy and I were renting a house in East Hampton. We had moved up from renting
the garage, which Jimmy’s editor at FSG told us about. That’s where Julie
Eisenhower would call me when we were working on her first book. She would
always say, ‘Daddy says hello.’ Daddy was the president at the time. I loved
Julie and had one of my great, private experiences with her and her husband
David during the Nixon madness just before his resignation.
It was 1979 when Gwen came to see me. She said, ‘You know, I love
this book, but gay men don’t want romance.’ I asked, ‘What are you talking
about?’
She had an apartment in the West Village and lived above a gay
bar. All that she saw were these leathermen. “Gay people don’t want romance,”
she said again.
I asked. ‘How long have you known me?’ She had been Alice Mayhew’s
assistant at S&S. I had an office there for over 20 years even though I was
freelance. She knew Jimmy. She knew her boss at Avon, Bob Wyatt, was gay. He
loved it. They bought it. Elaine Markson would not let the book die. Gwen spent
weeks trying to find a “better” title for it. I kept telling her naming the
book after the house was part of the game, like Dragonwyck. I won by
default. She and her office could not come up with anything better, thank god.
DF: How many copies did you sell?
VV: I have no idea. It went into several printings. Then Bob Wyatt
called Elaine. He told her he planned to do a Gaywyck series because it
was so popular. He had all of these wonderful writers lined up. I asked
Elaine, what is he talking about? She said, ‘He can’t do a series.’ She had crossed out the paragraph in my
contract that had originally said, if this book is a success, if the house
decides they want to do a series and the author doesn’t want to, the house has
the right to go ahead without the author. Jeez!
After Gaywyck came out, I was invited everywhere. I’m
monogamous. I went to these parties. I went to one dinner party given by Ed
White and Joe Brainerd was sitting opposite me with his shirt unbuttoned. He
took off his shoe and was rubbing my crotch with his foot under the
table. The photo taken of me by Jarry Lang for the book got me offers to
do nude centerfolds in gay magazines. Ed White had a boyfriend, John Purcell,
the most beautiful boy in New York. He became my assistant at S&S. He was
constantly going to chic parties. His beauty was his passkey. Ed was not
monogamous. John didn’t show up for work one day. I got a call from him…he was on
one of these private islands off the coast of Georgia. He had been taken there
by jet and was staying at a house called Gaywyck. His host did not
believe him when he said he knew me. So he called and introduced me to his host
over the phone. There were many gay men who named their houses ‘Gaywyck.’ I
received many fan letters with that as a P.S. All those letters are at the
Beinecke Library at Yale with Jimmy and my papers. I still get letters 100
years later. Many tell me I should have a streaming series made of the Gaywyck
Trilogy. I say ‘From your mouth to God’s ears, hon.”
Then I wrote A Comfortable Corner, which is about
recovery from alcoholism. That came out in ’82 as AIDS took over the world.
When I met Mark Doty, he told me how when his partner was dying, they read Gaywyck
and A Comfortable Corner out loud together.
All those people dying. Many of the characters in Jimmy’s Mawrdew
are based on his “sistahs.”..most of them died.
DF: These were Jimmy’s gay opera lovers?
VV: Yes. All the people from the opera line and the gay universe
he introduced me to when we met at Yale. I had never been to a gay bar. I
bumped into “Goody Greene” on the subway in the last days of his life. I almost
fainted, which was my m.o. confronting Death so directly. . They would come up
to me with their copies of Gaywyck and Corner. I would sign them
with mixed feelings. “I did not want my anonymity broken.” That’s the worst
thing that can happen to me. I’m not special.
People would ask me about A Comfortable Corner, how
do you know this? I’d say, “I’m a good researcher.”
They would invite me to hospitals. I was constantly going to
hospitals. They wanted me to sign their books.
I’d find myself in hospitals, fainting. I had to go to the
bathroom to put my head on the toilet, so I could avoid fainting. Finally,
Jimmy banned me from going to the hospitals and the funeral homes. When we
bumped into John Purcell in Paris in the last stages of AIDS, I literally had
to sit down and pretend to tie my shoelaces to get some blood to my head. I
hated myself for this weakness. Meanwhile, Jimmy was at dozens of bedsides when
people were dying. The heartache has never left me.
DF: Where was Jimmy going to his Twelve Step Meetings?
VV: Everywhere. He was one of the earliest people at the Perry
Street meeting, a gay one. He’d go to the Red Door meeting. It’s over there on
7th Avenue. It’s in a church that had a red door and still does. He
was going to meetings all the time, as was I. For a time, I was the radio voice
of my Program in 10, 20, 30-second commercials I wrote, community service
messages: ‘You know what the drinking is doing to them but do you know what it
is doing to you?’ Decades later, a guy came up to me at a Meeting in DC and
told me he recognized my voice from the radio. He said I was the message that
made him go to his first Meeting. I think of those radio spots as being among my
brightest moments. Me on the wings of the better angels of my nature.
They say we who live with or have lived with alcoholics are
the mirror image of them sharing all the horror-show dynamics. I believe it’s
why we are all anonymous in the Rooms because we are all the same in the
disease. I was going to eight meetings a week because it’s a disease of
isolation, among many other things. The isolation becomes so profound, and then
suddenly I had this crazy career with Michael Korda out there in the big wide
world, which I love madly, too. Again, it was all a state of grace.
Gypsy DaSilva was working at the New American Review with
Rhona Mostel. I had met everyone when I went in with Jimmy for some reason when
Ted Solataroff bought Jimmy’s story about Mawrdew Czgowchwa. Gypsy and I became
friends. Well, Gypsy called me at NYRB and told me Mawrdew was
being published by Simon and Schuster--they owned NAR--and they did not
want it. They hadn’t a clue what to do with it. They hated it. They were going
to publish it and dump it out there.
I was the typesetter at NYRB. I was there regularly on
weekends for Susan Sontag who was rushing to meet her deadlines. We became
friends. She would bring little David. She’d be smoking and writing and
he’d be puttering around, doing puzzles, homework, and reading. She would give
me the copy and I would set it. She would edit it, and I would reset it. Many
years later, when Jimmy and I were going to her apartment for tea--she had
taken some posh pastries from a dinner party the night before given by Annie
Leibovitz--she opened the door and announced, I may not be a very good writer
but I am a damned good rewriter! I told her she did not have to give me that
piece of news.
In any case, Gypsy told me that a man named Michael Di Capua from
FSG had called the New American Review saying he loved the piece, the
excerpt from the novel that was the cover piece for #13. Michael was told it
was being published by S&S.
Susan was published by FSG. I called her and told her what was
going on with Jimmy’s book. She had read the NAR bit and loved it. She
told me she would take care of it. And she did! It’s why Jimmy always referred
to her as his literary godmother. Michael bought the rights from S&S. He
was its exquisite, genius editor.
DF: You grew up partially in Queens?
VV: We lived in Long Island City and I went to the grammar school
at St. Patrick’s. The most important thing that happened to me in Long Island
City was the movie house on Vernon Boulevard, The Beacon. It was a rerun house.
In those days when a movie had its first run in the big theaters, it then went
to the smaller houses. After that, it disappeared. There was no Netflix then.
Jimmy had a similar second-run house near where he lived. We both became
obsessed with the movies at any early age. Spellbound in darkness is where my
life was changed. My family would take me to the movies—“The Wizard of
Oz” changed my life. I would go every single Saturday to the kiddie matinee. I
would walk home from St. Patrick’s and go past the Beacon. I would collect the
programs to see what was coming. Then I would go home.
I also discovered if I went to the Beacon and attached
myself to a couple that was not paying attention,, I could walk in behind them.
I would then zip into the men’s room, wait ‘til the lights went down, then
slip into the auditorium. I was in 3rd and 4th grade.
The nuns were vile. The nuns were vile. Not all, but most
of them I was constantly getting into trouble with the nuns.
One said, ’I cried because I had no shoes, but then I met a
man who had no feet.’ It was a lesson in gratitude, right?
I queried, ‘But sister, I have no shoes. She repeated the story
louder. ‘But sister, it’s winter and I am walking around with no shoes.’
Bam! [She hits the 8 or 9-year-old Vincent.] One day the priest came
in and declared that Jesus was killed by the Jews and the Jews would never go
to heaven. We must be very careful about the Jews.
Now, my best friend, my first boyfriend in the projects, was a
Jewish boy. The priest left and I raised my hand, ‘Sister, if the Jews didn’t
kill Jesus, we would have no religion.’
Bam! I went home and my mother told me ‘The Jews did
not kill Jesus. The Romans killed Jesus. Also, everyone can go to heaven. Even
Hitler can be in Heaven if he said he was sorry before he died.‘
Another day, our nun made the announcement, “They are showing Bitter
Rice at the Beacon. It is condemned by the Legion of Decency. If you go to Bitter
Rice, you will be excommunicated.’ Now, we’re talking a great Italian
neorealist movie with Sylvana Mangano. The poster was this big-tited Mangano
striding a rice field in Northern Italy. No one under eighteen could get in to
see it anyway. On a walk home, I had seen the poster. I knew I could not slip
into that one. Besides it was in Italian. I couldn’t speak Italian and did not
know about subtitles.
I raised my hand and said, ‘I saw the Bitter Rice….’ She
went insane. She grabbed me by the ear and dragged me down to the principal.
‘He saw Bitter Rice!’ They called the priest in to exorcise my demons, I
suppose. They called the theater manager. I couldn’t have seen it: It was
starting that night. And what age was I?
They called my mother. My mother was totally agoraphobic. A
neighbor brought her. “How could he have seen that condemned film?” She read
them the riot act. It was one of her bravest moments. Soon after, my father
moved us out to Lindenhurst, Long Island, which was horrible. I lost the Beacon
and my boyfriend. We’d stop the elevator, drop our pants, and snuggle. We’d go
to the movies and hold each other’s dicks under our coats Jeez!
I had my first serious boyfriend in the 7th grade out
on Long Island.
DF: Did he later become a gay man?
VG: No, not that I know of. He married and had kids, which means
nothing, I know. He was a horny, hung Italian. He loved having sex with me, his
equal. We went bicycling. In the woods, he taught me how to masturbate. His
parents were out all day, so we would meet in his basement and have sex for
hours. I was crazy happy and in love. With him and with sex. Then we went to a
Roman Catholic mission and I was told that I was going to hell, so I cut it
off. He was so horrified and I had a nervous breakdown. It’s recorded in my 8th
grade class picture. I’m writing a memoir called Picture Perfect based
on the truth found in photographs.
There was a wonderful psychiatrist named Richard Isay, who
played a major role in decriminalizing homosexuality. He wrote a very important
book about how most of his gay clients would claim, “My father hates me. My
father is so withdrawn from me.” Richard deduced that our fathers become aware,
maybe not consciously, that there are emotional demands being made by us gay
sons and pull away to protect themselves and us.
I was truly delighted to work with Richard’s ex-wife Jane,
publisher at Addison Wesley. They did my book Summer. I was the picture
person. Jimmy has a piece in it along with many other writers from The New
Yorker. His mother puts the silver in hock and they take a greyhound bus
across the country. I think Jimmy was 15 or 16. His brother is reading comic
books and he’s reading Dostoevsky. He gets up and goes to the back of the bus
to pee and there is this young sailor. The sailor is reading comic books. He
looks at the sailor. The sailor looks at him and he sits down next to the
sailor. They have sex in the back of the Greyhound bus. Oral sex. It is the
great story.
Well, I deliver the pictures and go out to East Hampton for the
actual summer. I get a call from Jane Isay. She has some kid getting more
pictures for the book. When I saw the layouts, I told everyone that you cannot
use a picture as a frontispiece for each story unless the image has some
relationship, however tenuous with the story. They told me I was wrong and the
art director willy-nilly stuck a picture with each story. Funny how so many
editors are visually illiterate and so many art directors have no sense of
text. Well, guess what? Production people and marketing people began asking why
a box of baseballs was linked with a story about fishing? When Jane told me she
was sending someone out to get more images, I took the train into Manhattan and
said my name is on that book and no one but me will solve the problem of their
own making.
And I did. It is what I do, after all. The book is fabulous. Then
I get another call from Jane. Addison Wesley is very unhappy with Jimmy’s
story. Very unhappy. ‘You can’t drop his story,’ I said. ‘I will not let you
publish the book with my name on it.’ The story ran and is a total delight, as
are my pictures for it. My fondest memory of the Summer project was
being taken to lunch many times a week at the Union Square Café around the
corner from the publisher.
DF: Was Susan Sontag’s sleeping with the publisher Roger Straus a
transaction?
VV: Susan loved men who could teach her and Straus could teach her
everything about the publishing world.
Susan was an ACOA [Adult Child of Alcoholics]. Susan was always
surprised when people were attracted to her.
DF: Did you spend much time with Susan Sontag and her last
girlfriend Annie Liebowitz?
VV: The couple of nights we spent with Susan and Annie…some of
them were really easy, but some of them were hard. They’d come to dinner at 22nd Street.
When Susan came for dinner, we always put the pot on the table, because Susan
ate as voraciously as she lived her life. We’d make a stew, we’d pot a chicken,
and she would eat.
Annie’s a heroin addict in recovery. They came to dinner one
night. Annie was exhausted. She was flying out to the Virgin Islands to shoot
Harrison Ford. Her crew was going with her at her expense. A fight broke out
over why she needed so many people. It could have been over anything.
Annie called me in DC about four years ago. ‘I’m doing a book,’
she said. ‘I want to know what’s at the Library of Congress about Emily
Dickinson?” I had done many, many books with the Library. Then she added, ‘You
were always so kind to me. Those nights when we would come over, you were
always so nice to me.’
We bonded. Annie was a visual creature. Susan was always angry
with her because she never read.
DF: It was the philosophy queen versus the pop photographer.
VV: She wanted to take care of Annie. She wanted Annie to improve.
She wanted to perfect Annie. That was her job. They had a really intense
relationship. Annie said to me, ‘I’ve never seen Susan so relaxed as when
she’s with you.’ My only regret is that Annie looked for the camera in her
purse and she had left it home. I would love to have a picture of Susan, shoes
off, legs tucked under her butt, chatting away with Jimmy at full speed.
There’s a chapter in Benjamin Moser’s Sontag bio that takes its title
from an evening at our house. Ben does Jimmy a great disservice in that
book. He does not include how Susan told a friend of ours in Boston, “Jimmy and
Vincent are the only reason for marriage I know of.’ I told Ben that story. He
gives Jimmy short shrift totally ignoring their profound relationship over
decades.
I got the job at the New York Review of Books because my
lesbian wife, Isabel, was having an affair with Sharon Delano, an editor at The
Review. Isabel and I are trying to get a divorce. She’s in England. We’ve
been trying to get a divorce for the last five years. That’s why I can’t marry
Jimmy. Isabel had the papers as instructed by my lawyer, but then we were told
by a clerk in the New York court that she had to go to a consulate in the U.K.
There is no consulate near Cornwall where she lives. Our current Lawyer for the
Arts is still trying for us.
Sharon Delano adored Jimmy and hated me. She once asked him how
someone like him could be living with someone like me. They would go out
drinking together and she adored his work.
Barbara Epstein, one of the founders, was a true, high-end
“intellectual” who couldn’t manage the hold button on her phone. I mean, huh?
She’d be chatting with her pal Gore Vidal in Italy and I’d be working on
deadline waiting for Barbara’s final edits. So I would cut them off. She would
be screaming at Sharon Delano. Distracted like a cat, Barbara would edit the
piece, then get back on the phone with Gore.
After posting in my copy room what everyone was paid, I got fired.
Whitney Ellsworth, the rich publisher, used to tell each of us behind the
closed door of his office that we were getting the highest raises and we must
not tell anyone how many miserable pennies he gave us. Of course, he was
lying. I went out to Long Island on unemployment. I was reading these
Gothic novels. I would get them for my Mom from S&S because I, too, loved the genre. If the sublime secret in The
Woman in White were mine, I would kill, too. Well in the modern gothic
romance there is never a crazy wife stashed in the attic or an
illegitimate title. The “secret” was too often that the husband was a faggot
screwing a stablehand or his valet or Whomever was handy in the plot. I said to
myself, “This is fucking gross.” I would write a gay gothic with all the
trimmings. I was also reading Lolita and decided to give my hero
Lolita’s “dimpled knees.” So, the game was afoot!
We were out in Hampton Bays because a friend had a house on a hill
overlooking the water. Jimmy got the letter from Maria, Maria Callas, for Mawrdew.
It was forwarded by FSG. He went down the hill to get the mail and I heard
him screaming as he was peddling up that long drive. He was waving a letter and
screaming. “It’s from Maria!” I will never forget that joyful scream! He was
also on the radio with Leontyne Price who loved the book. I had to sit in the
car to get reception. It was the night Beverly Sills was making her Met debut,
and after their conversation about the book, Jimmy asked Leontyne if she were
going to the Met and she said what entered our chat, she said, “Oh, no. Somehow
I don’t think I need demonstrate quite that degree of largesse.” Heaven, no?
DF: When did you and Jimmy live on Mott Street?
VV: We left Yale and went to London for two years. We came back
for Jimmy’s brother’s wedding. I worked as a temp typist and sold drinks at
night in theaters. I was saving money to go back. I got the agency to send us
abroad to their London office with a temporary working permit. I was a very
good typist. I wanted to take it in High School but as an “intellectual” was
not allowed to take it or auto mechanic classes. I told my guidance counselor I
needed it so I could type my papers in college. I was the only boy in the
class. I got 99 on my Regents. That skill kept us from starving many a time.
We were in London for several more years then came back to New
York when Ted Solatraoff bought Mawrdew. There was a postal strike so he
sent Jimmy a telegram: MAWRDEWCZGOWCHWZDAZZLINGSTOPLETTERFOLLOWS GPOSTRIKE. That
cable hung on our walls for years and it was in the stuff we sold to Yale’s
Beinecke Library along with the letter from Maria, which was fading in the
light. When we came home to New York, I was living on Long Island and Jimmy was
living in Queens. We would meet and cohabit in friend’s apartments, sleeping
and fucking in all of our gay friends’ apartments. They would come home from
work and have to deal with these two maniacs in their bedrooms.
One day, I was walking down the street in Manhattan and ran into
this guy who was at Yale with us, Robert Landau. He was going to be an opera
singer and was getting married. He told me he was getting married and asked me
if we would like his studio apartment. ‘It’s 72 Irving Place. It’s a
rent-controlled apartment, but you have to be me.’
I moved into the apartment with Jimmy and painted it bright
yellow. It was half a brownstone building with five floors. I was Bob Landau.
Then one morning, Jimmy’s in the bathtub and at the door is the landlord. He
comes in, sits down and says, ‘Bob, I need someone to be the super for the
building. I’ll give you free rent.’ I can’t take free rent because I am not Bob
Landau. I said, ‘No, no, just freeze the rent at 90 dollars. ‘All you have to
do,’ he said, ‘is wash down the floors once a week and make sure the trash is
okay in the front. If anything goes wrong, you call people. I’ll give you a
list.’
We are sitting and we are talking, talking and talking. This guy
was fabulous. And Jimmy’s in the bathtub. Finally, 90 minutes later, he gets up
and goes into the bathroom to pee. He’s peeing. Jimmy is in the bathtub.
The man leaves and I’m the super, Bob the super. And Jimmy is freezing.
Years later, his daughter moved in. She was studying acting at
Juilliard. I’m Bob Landau. We became very friendly. She’s adorable. We’d eat
dinner together, watch movies. Finally, we told her. She called her father and
he thought that was the funniest thing that he had ever heard. I was Bob Landau
for about four years.
A sheriff lived on the second floor. Well, he was murdered. He
brought some guy home and was getting fist-fucked and the guy pulled his guts
out. His studio apartment had heavy furniture and all these paintings of naked
boys and naked men. As the super, I was in most apartments when there were
problems. The police and the sheriffs came because he had disappeared from
work. They would not let me into the apartment and they sent a team to clean
the place.
I went upstairs one day and found 13 pairs of shoes in the
hallway. The workers from a Szechuan restaurant up the block lived in the
apartment above me. They were taking turns sleeping. I walked in and there was
a tribe. They got all upset. I said, ‘I don’t give a shit. I don’t hear a
thing. Just bring the shoes in so I can clean the hall.’ After that, twice a
week there would be dinner hanging on the door in a plastic bag. A professional
photographer lived on the second floor. A silent movie actress lived on the
first. She had posters from her movies on her walls. I wish I had asked her for
a signed photo.
DF: In publishing, you worked for Michael Korda?
VV: I was Michael Korda’s researcher. I got the job through Gypsy
da Silva. When I went for the interview, he was sitting at a huge desk with his
back to the window. S&S was then on Fifth Avenue. Michael and I talked for
a while and he said, waving his hand over his shoulder to Fifth Avenue, “This
book is not for us, it’s for Them.” We both laughed. From that moment on, I
adored him. He was both enchanting and brilliant and very, very funny. You must
never forget I have Yale on my resume. After I finished working on Success, he
wanted to keep me around. He asked me if I’d ever been a picture editor. I lied
and said sure. He handed me John Wayne’s album, “America, Why I Love Her.” and
told me to make a book out of it.
Also in my building lived Agnes Meyer. She was the head of Random
House’s picture division. In those days, all the publishing houses had picture
departments. I asked Agnes, ‘How do I make a book out of a record? Agnes said,
‘You can’t do this. You can’t turn 12 songs into a book. I couldn’t do it.”
“Well, I had to pay the rent. She handed me a book called Picture
Sources. In that book, I found the Library of Congress. I was listening and
listening to the album--Wayne has the most beautiful voice and he’s one of my
signed photos, too--and I said to Jimmy, these could easily fit timeless WPA
photos. Their job was to capture America. I can’t use Migrant Mother but I know
enough of them from books to see how they could work here. I didn’t know
that people bought photos. Nobody told me.
I called the Army, Navy, and Marines. They all said yes. I called
Chevrolet, I called Shell Oil. ‘You know those beautiful pictures of America in
your ads?’ They told me, ‘We don’t sell those pictures.’ I told them, ‘Well,
I’m doing a book with JOHN WAYNE. Would you like a credit in a book by JOHN
WAYNE? I’ll give you any credit line you want. They all said yes. They all gave
them to me for free. Then I went and talked to the photographer on the second
floor. When I told him about the project, he offered his pictures for free as
long as he got credit for them. I accepted his offer, something I would never
do today. Now I’d pay him the going rate. But who knew about going rates then?
I went to the Library of Congress and worked with a curator there, Bernie Ryan.
Nearly twenty years later, I was working with him again but he was then the
head of Prints and Photographs. He told me theThomas Jefferson building was
having its centenary and would I do a book with them? The book was the
extravaganza, Eyes of the Nation, published by Knopf. In 1977,
Wayne sold 2 million copies and I was a professional picture editor with a
credit on the copyright page.
DF: Was the place you lived with Jimmy on Mott Street an awful
place?
VV: I was managing a small experimental theater on 59th Street for
a while. When I found the place, the floor slanted all the way down. There was
one big room, a kitchen, bathroom and one table. I told the crew at the theater
that I needed some help. They put tar paper on the floor. They put a beam along
the rear wall with the back legs of the borrowed couch on it, so the floor
looked level to the eye. I hung curtains on the back, windowless wall with a
poster of Paris for my view. I love Paris. I came out with Jimmy in Paris. They
brought carpets down from the theater. I had found a carpet in the dumpster one
night when I was with the Golubs. The show had starred Keir Dulea. He had
walked barefoot on it and I treasured it. I still have it. The place was a
really swell theatrical set.. You know the line from Boys in the Band?
‘It takes a sissy to make something pretty.’ I painted the bathroom light
blue and stupidly put a huge sheet of heavy plastic on the wall to prevent the
plaster from getting wet. Well, within weeks I had a diverse, flowering
botanical garden behind it that I had to trim around the edges of the plastic
sheet. God only knows what was living in there!. One day, Jimmy was in the bath
and the tub dropped though the floor. Fortunately, it was only a two foot drop.
He seems to have bad karma in tubs.
There was a Puerto Rican family living upstairs with eight
members. Their adolescent son was so polite and sweet. I met him one day and he
was upset because he had homework to do and there was all this activity
upstairs. I gave him a key to our place so he could do his homework at the
table. I would come home and there would be cookies or some Puerto Rican thing
on the table.
The only problem we ever had there was rats. You had to walk
through the tenement on the street and cross a large courtyard to get to our
place. For some reason, probably construction in the neighborhood, we were
suddenly inundated with rats. I mean, it was heinous. We could hear them
scratching through the walls and see them running around the molding below the
ceiling. Jimmy was often so drunk, he had passed out so I would sit up to make
certain one would not get into bed with us, something that had happened to a
friend living on St. Mark’s Place one cold night. One day I came home and found
one in the bathtub. I got a paper bag, ran the water, the rat ran into the bag,
and I ran outside to put in a garbage can. I mean, what the hell does one do
with a rat too big to flush down the toilet? There I am running down the
hallway. There the rat is gnawing through the paper bag. When I lifted the
garbage can’s lid, it plopped into the empty can. I banged down the lid and
went into the building noticing a bum making his way down the street checking
out the garbage cans. I barely reached my place when I heard the most god awful
screech and the lid banging on the sidewalk. I felt awful. I called the cops
and told the one who answered how my place was full of rats. The cop asked me
how I knew it was rat and not mice. I told him, ‘I’ve read Alice in
Wonderland.’ The smart-ass cop told me, if I could read Alice in
Wonderland I was old enough to deal with a rat in the bathtub. Of course,
he was right. So, I had to fill all the holes in the place with steel wool to
stop them eating the soap and racing around the molding. Well, then, they would
try to eat through the steel wool and the first brave creature to try it would
cut itself and the others would eat it to get more blood. So there would be the
most terrifying screaming rats in the walls. There are a dozen crazy stories
about that house. I’ve got all of them in this first draft of my memoir Picture
Perfect. I got the title from Hillary Clinton who signed a picture to me
when I finished working with her on her memoir, Living History. ‘Thank
you for making my book picture perfect.’ I did President Bill’s book,
too. We lived on Mott Street during the infamous garbage strike and went back
to England for another two-plus years.
The building is still there. Mott Street is now ridiculous. All
these designers. I wonder what they have done to that two-story townhouse. You
can see it over the wall.
My father could not believe we were living on Mott Street. He took
me to a Chinese restaurant. We went in the back door like the opening of Goodfellas.
A door in the hallway wall opened when a waiter pushed it for us.
Four men were sitting in a small room. They were in a very bad mood because
Little Bootsie had been shot. Nobody ordered. The food appeared via the
friendly waiter. It was the fanciest Chinese food I had ever eaten. I was
so overwhelmed by this food and all these men sitting around the table, talking
about Little Bootsie. We ate. We went home. Jimmy thought my having a title was
a camp. He used to tease me as a ‘count of no account.’ I inherited the family
title after World War Two when Italy became a kingdom for five minutes. My
father and older brother said no, but I was five and wasn’t asked. So I won the
title. Seems in Italy, ‘count’ is equivalent to ‘earl’ in England. He stopped
teasing when he went shopping after my deluxe Chinese meal. He bought some fish
and the fishmonger gave him an extra piece asking him to ‘say hello to Vinnie.’
The same thing happened in the bakery, extra cookies and the same request. One
day when I was in the bath, one of the suits stuck his head in the bathroom
window to say hello to me.
Even the grin vanished in Venice.
In London, I had seen “Othello” with Laurence Olivier and Maggie
Smith twice for her. We would queue overnight. I went with the woman who I
would eventually marry so she could stay in the States. The cops would walk up
and down the line, making sure we were okay. We were all wrapped up. In the
morning, Maggie Smith would arrive and would give us coffee. This was the Old
Vic in London. We would buy two-shilling tickets up in the gods and sit on
the steps overlooking the stage because the staff knew us, we were regulars. We
would just go, go and see these great productions over and over again. There
were the trips by train to one of the 500 rep companies and then we went to the
West End several times each week. Plus Covent Garden and The Proms. Mahler was
being rediscovered by the world, too.
Well, one day, I’m heading home from the Old Vic and I fell
down in the street. Severe pain in my side. I’m with Diana Kirkwood, a Yale
classmate now studying at the Old Vic in Bristol. She hails a cab. The driver
asks where’s the pain? I say “Here.” He takes me to the kidney
hospital. They can’t find anything. An Indian doctor does the test three
times. Indeed, I have a touch of TB in the kidney. Why do I have TB? At
Bonaventure, I had a double major. I went to the psychology department and
signed up with them. Then I went to the English department and signed up with
them. This was BC, before computers.
I got straight As. Administration called me in and said you can’t
do this. But, I’m doing this. We had the best basketball team in the United
States. I fell in love with basketball. I fell in love with the players. They
had their own chef. They put me in with these basketball players. I was their
mascot. Little white Vinny with these basketball players who were national
celebrities. Had been on the cover of Time.
We ate all these special foods. They discovered that the chef had
TB and the whole team had TB. They tested everyone but they didn’t test little
me.
After the hospital, I had to get some rest. Aubrey Tarbox, who is
Dame Sybil Tarbox in Mawrdew Czgowchwz, was a very rich boy.
Tarbox, Massachusetts? His great-grandfather invented the wooden match. They
were very rich. He was demented with money and was a compulsive fantasist
and a formidable liar. He said he would send me to Venice for a month. So he
gave us money to go to Venice.
We get to Venice. We are staying at a pensione and the money is
coming. Then it stops. Jimmy calls Aubrey and he’s disappeared. No money. We
are stranded. We set a telegram to Diana Kirkwood in London. She responds
immediately. “Money on the way.” Her father was the president of the University
of Beirut. It took almost a week to get to us. The owner of the pensione told
us we had to sign on with the police. I go down and I am sitting there. This
American woman sits next to me. She points to the owner of the pensione. “He’s
a count.”
“I’m a count,” I said. “Everybody in this town is a count. He
looked it up in the blue book and, indeed, I am a count. Seems my title is
bigger than his title, if he really has one. Enter Jimmy right on cue to go
with me to sign with the police. The owner is talking to me in Italian. Jimmy
speaks the most beautiful Roman Italian but in the time we were in Venice he
had mastered the Venetian dialect. I told the owner that I never spoke Italian
in Italy because it makes me too sad. Now, Jimmy and I were masters of improve
in school. The owner gave us back the key to the bath and invited us to resume
taking our dinner with the other guest. We were given our bags back. This was
before the 32 million tourists in Venice annually now. We explored all over
Venice that visit. With Diana’s money we went back to London.
I was working as a temp-typist until the work visa ran out. Then I
started working illegally through friends as ‘David Welsh.’ On one job I was a
kitchen porter in a Piccadilly Circus nightclub called Tiffany’s. Soon I was
the short order cook dishing out my spaghetti Bolognese with chunks of bologna
on the chef’s orders, my chips--I peeled and cut by hand a million each night.
On a piece of toast went the pasta and sauce, baked beans, a fried egg, a
sausage, and a mound of chips. A quintessentially English dish.
The Irish head bartender co-opted me and taught me how to
‘fiddle,’ slang for cheat.. It was an amazing place. Edward the
Second used to go there when he was Prince of Wales. You opened the
kitchen’s exit door into the back door’s loading dock, went up a flight of
stairs and there you were in the original Edwardian club. It was something out
of a movie. It was intact with the tables and the tablecloths.
Our rent was seven pounds a week. I would bring home 60, 70 pounds
a week. They taught me how to diddle the cash giving change to the customers.
Suddenly I was a professional bartender. I didn’t do cocktails. All I did was
serve the beer and the drinks. We were rich.
You give me the money for the booze, like two pounds. There are
all these distractions, all these mirrors. I ring up 1.50. I give you the
receipt. Thank you. You go. I kept the 50. Being the crook and the cunning,
manipulative creature I am, I thrived. I loved those guys.
I got the job via Anne Cunningham-Tree, obviously her stage name.
She was in our acting class. She had a deep, luscious voice and flawless coming
timing. She was also the mistress of the Lebanese ambassador. ‘Safi,’ but he
was impotent. He’d put her in his wife’s jewels and their limo and they’d go
out to all these high-end restaurants. She was a beautiful girl with a cockney
accent when she wasn’t ‘at work’ and sounded like the Queen. One night at the
entrance to a restaurant, she said to him truthfully, ‘You are so adorable,”
and pinched his cheek and he came. Changed her life. Suddenly, he wasn’t
impotent. What he wanted was the rougher the better. We gave her a key. She
would come in the middle of the night. We were living in a bedsit. She would
arrive after fleeing from him. She would be all dolled up. She’d strip to her drawers,
take off her makeup, and tup and tail in our sink before going to sleep on the
floor. Finally, she broke away from him.
The chef would give me all the food to take home on Sunday night
because they were closed until Thursday night. When I was working with Hillary,
she would give me all the food in her fridge, too, because she and Bill would
be gone for weekends and their cook was anxious about keeping it in the fridge
too long. obut much of the week.. The cook gave me a note saying that I
didn’t steal it.
I had so much change in my pockets, I could barely walk home. The
cops would join me and walk home with me on their beat. One night, Paul
McCartney joined me and walked me part of the way home to Notting Hill Gate. We
were living parallel to Portobello Road.
We stayed by getting a year’s visitor’s visa with notes from
Jimmy’s mother and my Aunt Judy saying we were being supported by
them. Eventually, we’d get a note from
the Home Office telling us to renew by sending them four items. We would send
three. Remember, this is BC. Two months later we’d get another letter returning
the three items we sent and requesting we send four. This ruse got us an extra
three or four months each year until we were given an appointment to apply in
person. Jimmy’s mother was sending us $90 a month. My Aunt Judy was sending
$50. That was a lot of money in those days. We would go to the continent
as often as we could.
During the period when I was legally working as a temp typist,
many opportunities were offered to me. Working for a solicitor, I told his
secretary that what I was typing did not make any sense. It was a brief for
court. The lawyer came out and asked me what was my problem. I read the bit
that was incomprehensible and told him I would not want him representing me. He
laughed and offered me a job. If I worked for him for seven years, I would
become a barrister and get to wear that crazy white wig.
Law is all the same. It’s all precedence. There is no invention,
only cunning collusion. I was making so much money. I had no trouble learning
the ropes, finding my way in his library of previous cases. I love solving
problems. I told Jimmy ‘I can do this.’ But, I knew I could never spend my life
doing such high-end drudge work.
I went to the London Welsh Association in Bloomsbury as a temp
typist around the corner from Virginia Woolf’s bombed-out house. There were
these two clowns supposedly running the London Welsh Association, drunken
goons. I started fielding their calls, writing their reports. I’m the temp
typist representing the London Welsh Association at meetings. One day, I got a
phone call from Lord Aberdare, the patron of the organization. ‘Come have tea
with me,’ he ordered politely. I’ll never forget that huge house, with all
those servants, and his embroidered velvet slippers. He told me flat-out how he
wished I would take over the Association’s reins because he was hearing
marvelous things about me from everyone. The goons were fired and I became the
London Welsh Association. Somehow my visa was never an issue with them. It was
such a camp. I went from 11 pounds a week to 60 pounds a week. We were rich.
Unfortunately, The London Welsh Association with its paneled walls and
portraits was no longer an essential organization for anyone. I certainly
earned my money. Eventually, they shut the place down and I was in need of a
job.
Out of nowhere, I got a green card, a work permit and my insurance
card in the mail. I think Lord Aberdare may have had something to do with this.
He was a kind, gracious, beautiful man. Mysteriously, I was then offered a job
as a civil servant.
I was typing letters to Americans
informing them they could not come to London without a work permit. It was
easy. I set a record for responses in one day. There were all these Brits with
accents from all over England. I'd tell people I was Canadian. A woman said,
"You don't look Canadian." I said, "Well, my mother is
Japanese." That was the end of it. I knew these people and their love of
privacy.
Then Jimmy got the telegram from Ted
Solataroff, who found Mawrdew Czgowchwz dazzling. Jimmy was writing all
the time. He's home writing and I'm out there. I still have a touch of
agoraphobia. When I had my career and was meeting people, I had trouble getting
out of the house. I still have trouble getting out of the house. Jimmy says it
takes me two trips to get out of the house.
Basically, then we came back to the
U.S.
DF: Do you still go to meetings?
VV: When I go to a meeting and
someone weeps, I feel I am in a state of grace as their denial cracks open in
the safe, blessed space that is the Rooms. That is why I keep coming back. It
is their courage that brings them there. I feel blessed by their courage,
always. And their unconscious contact with the god of their understanding. I
still weep after 43 years.
I hope Jimmy goes over to Perry
Street. The last time he went there, there were still some of the old queens
alive. They all got emotional about him. And he went to the Red Door and they
all got emotional, too. All the survivors like him. And with him.
In Recovering, Leslie
Jamison wrote about Gordon Lish and Raymond Carver. When Raymond Carver became
sober, Lish still cut the short stories. He didn’t want hope in Carver’s
stories. If any of the characters moved toward hope, Lish would cut them out.
That’s why Carver left Lish at the end, because he kept cutting and cutting.
In Program, they jokingly call
alcoholism a three-fold disease—Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s.
That’s when it becomes triggered and that’s when it goes through the roof. Our
roof has been on our houses for a long time now. As I keep saying, I’m blessed.
