Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise Read online

  I met her in the most improbable place, at a Canton graduation. This was a girls’ school graduation, virginal to a fault, austere as a Shaker hymn. Afterward on the lawn, the faculty mingled with the girls’ families, picking at the lobster buns and petit fours that seemed to grow staler and more rancid by the year, an afternoon tea out of a cryogenics vault. Gert—Miss Gertrude Macy—the maiden great-aunt of one of my students, was sitting knock-kneed on one of the grisly folding chairs, still cobwebbed from storage, that cluttered the lawn behind the library.

  I was graciously introduced as the school poet. “I had no idea there were still poets around,” remarked Miss Macy in her gravelly voice. “How encouraging.”

  It was only a moment before I was sitting cross-legged beside her chair, trying to hide from my dreary graduation duties in the shade of Miss Macy’s presence. It turned out she had worked in the theater all her life, serving as stage manager and general factotum for Miss Katharine Cornell’s company. Unarguably, Cornell was the leading lady of American theater in the time between the wars. Gert started with her in 1928, through the yearly triumphs in New York—Candida, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Saint Joan, Romeo and Juliet, Antigone—and then when the season was over, going on the road with the touring company.

  I was the perfect audience for the backstage version of all of this. I’d grown up bitten by the theater, done my share of teeth-jarring overacting while in college, and still went faithfully to the Boston tryouts of everything. I had even seen Miss Cornell on stage in her last tour, a two-character performance with Brian Aherne called Dear Liar, being the letters of Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Not much of a play at all, really, with just the two of them standing at lecterns. And Gert would tell me later how grueling that tour was, Cornell but a ghost of the diva she had been. But at least I’d been in the presence, and so could imagine the Kit Cornell who swept through Gert’s marvelous stories.

  One year they were on their way to Seattle, the whole company on a train, The Barretts I think. It’s difficult to imagine today how profound the excitement was, when a star of Cornell’s magnitude came to the provinces, bag and baggage, a genuine New York production in tow. Alas, there was late spring snow in the mountains, and the train got mired. No way were they going to make Seattle for opening night, that very evening. Gert telegraphed ahead to cancel the first performance.

  They pulled into Seattle about ten hours late, exhausted and chilled. The theater owner met them coining off the train, as the sets and costumes were being unloaded from boxcars. He announced to Gert that the audience was waiting at the theater in their seats. By now it was ten or eleven P.M., and it would take hours to put up the set and light it. They simply couldn’t perform tonight.

  But the audience wouldn’t leave, no matter how many announcements were made, even the offer of a special performance at the end of the run. They just sat there politely in their evening clothes. And because Kit and the others grew up in a time when the show just had to go on, the curtain went up a little before dawn, transporting them all back to Wimpole Street in the 1830s. A thrilling performance, according to Gert, though it could hardly have been a bust with such an amazing prelude. The burghers of Seattle clapped their gloves off.

  Gert had known everyone, from Olivier to Brando, the latter playing Marchbanks to Kit’s umpteenth revival of Candida. They didn’t really know any movie stars to speak of, unless they had acted first on the stage. Hollywood was so far beneath the notice of Miss Cornell and her fellow stage immortals. All her life she turned down script after script, chance after chance to preserve herself on celluloid. But to her generation Hollywood was the opposite of “legitimate,” not even close to what they in the theater called acting. Thus there is scarcely any record at all of the great lady’s work, except for a moment’s cameo in Stage Door Canteen, undertaken for patriotic reasons.

  Gert wasn’t so much of a snob herself, and admitted to an unapologetic fanship. She was breathless the day Olivier brought his new wife, Vivien Leigh, backstage to meet Cornell. But most overwhelming of all was the unannounced appearance of Garbo in the aisle seat in Row H, the seat beside her reserved for her fur coat. Remember, Gert reminded me, warming to her favorite anecdote, this was at a time when Garbo was mythic, thousands of women in New York affecting the slouch hat and the hooded look of the otherworldly star. Alerted to her presence, Gert and the rest of the company peeked through the crack in the curtains, gasping.

  Then Miss Cornell herself appeared and demanded to know what the ruckus was. She took a quick peek and declared the woman in Row H nothing but a wannabe (or whatever they called them then). And besides, she declared imperiously, who cared about Garbo and all that nonsense. Places please, we have a show to put on!

  As The Barretts reached its climax, Gert put in a fast call to L.A., to a publicist she knew who’d worked with Garbo. “Do you know where she is right this minute?” asked Gert when he took the call. As a matter of fact, he said, he had no idea at all, for Garbo had disappeared from a movie set about three days before, leaving the whole of the glitter kingdom in the lurch. Accustomed to such behavior by now, the studio bit its nails and waited.

  When Kit came offstage at last, with a dozen curtain calls and an armload of roses, Gert confronted her triumphantly: it was the real thing out there. Airily Kit dismissed the news and made for her dressing room. Gert fumed. Then five minutes later the Swedish diva herself appeared at the stage door, shy and practically muffled in her fox collar, pulled in like a turtle. “Miss Garbo to see Miss Cornell,” mumbled that unmistakable voice. A stunned Gert stepped forward and led legend to meet legend.

  Kit wouldn’t let Gert come in with Garbo. Gert paced impatiently, and about ten minutes later Kit stuck her head out of the dressing room, sweetly ordering her to take Guthrie over to ‘21’ for supper. Guthrie McClintic was Kit’s husband and director for forty years, a gay man, as I later found out. Sent off like children, Gert and Guthrie ordered stiff martinis and caviar at the restaurant, defying Kit’s rule that her guests could order anything on the menu except caviar, which even she with all her extravagance thought too dearly priced.

  When Gert and Guthrie came lurching home to Beekman Place, they found that Kit had brought Garbo to the house. The two actresses sat in the parlor before the fire, eating soup and sharing a torn baguette. As Gert came in, Garbo was laughing (Garbo laughs!) and waving her bare feet in the air. “See how big they are!” she announced with glee. “Like a fishwife’s!”

  This was definitely a story of the Homeric Age, when stars were gods and goddesses. I didn’t really think so much at the time about the gay subtext. But for months afterward, whenever I told the story to friends old enough to know the cast of characters, they always interrupted me to say: “Oh yes, Miss Macy—she was Cornell’s lover for years. And Guthrie had all the boys.” It seemed like a secret that nobody kept. Except it somehow remained unspoken, protected by a wall of glamour that the press wouldn’t have dreamed of trying to vault. It was, as I say, a certain understanding—a separate life conducted on the higher slopes of Olympus, underscored by a reflex of discretion. A bohemian aristocracy, if that’s not too much of a contradiction in terms.

  Gert and I parted fast friends, swearing we’d meet again before the summer waned, but who ever keeps such promises? As it happened, the ’76 graduation was my last at Canton Academy. I’d decided I would never be the writer I wanted to be if I stayed in school. I would therefore take a year off and try to write a novel. I’d applied for a grant to see me through, but still hadn’t heard about that. Roger said he’d support me, while I swore I’d wait tables if necessary.

  I don’t recall if Craig and I decided to go to the Vineyard before or after Gert’s call. Craig was my closest pal in Boston—met the same night I met Roger two years before, and fascinated like me by the glow of stars and all the attendant tinsel. Of everyone I told, Craig was the one who ate up the story of Garbo in Row H like popcorn.

  Anyway, Craig inv
ited me down to Martha’s Vineyard for an overnight, to stay with a friend of his youth from Williamstown. I knew Gert had a summer place at the Vineyard, but didn’t have the number. Then, just days before we were ready to depart for the Woods Hole ferry to the island, Gert phoned out of the blue. She had a story to tell me, she said, about an extraordinary visitor she’d had at her house on the bluffs of the Hudson, which she’d been in the process of shutting up for the summer before making the trek north to the island. Garbo, I blurted in quick reply, and she laughed at my perspicacity. Delighted to hear I was coming over to the Vineyard, she said she’d save the details till then.

  Thus Craig and I made our excited way to Gert’s place on a drowsy morning in early July. It was hardly bigger than a fisherman’s shack—a house for one, make no mistake—and perched on what amounted to a sand bar between the lambent surf of the bay and a reed-rimmed salt pond. So nicely isolated that you could just see the roofpeaks of Gert’s near neighbors. Yet we had scarcely entered the little house—shipshape as a captain’s quarters, an island all its own—and were still saying hello to Gert when the phone rang.

  It was Nancy Hamilton, yet another of the charmed inner circle of Miss Cornell, and like Gert an aging survivor of the golden years. Playwright and lyricist, famous wit, she had given the very best parties in the old days. Kit had left her The Barn on the Vineyard, her last home there, across the pond from Gert’s. And now Nancy was calling to inquire suspiciously: Who were those two young men she’d seen driving up the ribbon of beach road to Gert’s? She must’ve been spying with binoculars from the widow’s walk to catch a glimpse of us. With a certain malicious glee Gert told Nancy she’d been expecting us, but not a word as to who we were.

  We swam in the bay and lay in the sun, while Gert brought us our first bullshot of the day (oh, how she could put away vodka). Then, sitting grandly on her deck in her trademark cobalt-blue-lensed sunglasses, in khaki shorts and an old army shirt, she regaled us with the tale of Garbo’s visit. The legendary recluse had been longing to get out of Manhattan, where the weather that June had been unbearably sultry. A mutual friend suggested they spend an afternoon at Gert’s place in Sneden’s Landing, about fifteen minutes north of the George Washington Bridge. It took a week to coax her, but Garbo finally said yes, adding wearily, “Does she have to know who I am?”

  Now don’t say anything about her career in pictures, the friend warned Gert. Just a little lunch in the garden, and keep the conversation bland. Gert made sure her collection of little dogs—a veritable pack of Shih-tzus and Pekingese, along with a dimwit Irish setter she’d adopted after a Sneden’s neighbor died—stayed inside with the housekeeper. Garbo was offered a sunny spot, a shady spot, the view through the trees to the lordly river below. Nothing was quite right, because she’d left her sweater in the taxi on the way. She fretted about that sweater all afternoon.

  I think she affected not to remember the evening she spent with Miss Cornell showing off her big feet—it must have been thirty or forty years ago by then. The more Gert filled in the details, the more did Garbo seem to stiffen and grow aloof. “Not very bright, I’m afraid,” Gert told us with keen disappointment. Garbo was wearing a blouse with a hundred buttons all the way up to her chin, and she kept patting at her neck to make sure it didn’t show. “Miss Garbo,” Gert asked her gently, “why don’t you just unbutton your collar and feel the breeze?” After all, they were just three old ladies out on the terrace, no paparazzi for miles around. But no, she stayed buttoned up.

  The only other thing I remember from Gert’s account of the day Garbo came to lunch happened over the stuffed avocados. Gert was chatting amiably with the mutual friend, and Garbo was staring moodily at the river below, when suddenly she announced, a propos of nothing, “I hate it when somebody calls me Gigi.” No one had done so. But Gert smiled gamely and observed, “Well, you don’t have to worry about that, because everyone in the world calls you Garbo.” The look on the legend’s face just then was a queer mix of offended dignity, as if someone had come too close, and a half-smile of satisfaction, basking in the world’s notice.

  That was all—no real bullseye anecdotes, no reverberating Garbo lines of the caliber of I want to be alone or the first words she ever spoke in pictures, asking for a whiskey in Anna Christie. But Craig and I pealed with laughter at every morsel, giddy as a pair of opera queens, as if we were privy to the high jinks of a rare inner circle of our kind. For it didn’t need stating aloud here either, that the oh-so-subtle friction between Gert and Garbo was a confrontation of lesbians, a duel over the shadows of the past. Perhaps Craig and I were so ga-ga about the smallest details because these closeted stars were the only kind of role models we had from the past. The work to reclaim our history was only just beginning among the tribe’s scholars and chroniclers. In our youth we had to make do with high gossip, and Gert was there for the footnotes.

  Craig was more brazen than I that day, oiled by bullshots and bluntly asking, “What was Tallulah like?” Or Julie Harris, whom Gert had produced in I Am a Camera. But the story that struck the deepest chord in me was the one about Marlene Dietrich. In ’44, Kit and her troupe had volunteered to perform for the Allied troops, a six-month tour of The Barretts that took them through Italy and France, sometimes a bare few miles from the fighting. When they finally got to Paris they were wilted and beat, not having had a proper bath in weeks, much less a hot one.

  Dietrich, who had never met Cornell, was being put up in the Imperial Suite at the Ritz, vacated by U.S. Navy brass in deference to the supreme entertainer of the Allied forces. Dietrich put in a call to Kit’s coldwater hotel and invited her up for a nice, hot bath. Gert went along as an aide-de-camp—damned if she’d be shut out again the way she’d been with Garbo. Dietrich couldn’t have been more gracious, leaving the two women alone in a rose marble bath fitted out for a pasha. Kit and Gert luxuriated in the steam and the cloud-like towels. After an hour they dressed and made ready to leave, not wishing to inconvenience the Kraut any further.

  But as they were saying goodbye, Dietrich cast a disapproving look at the olive-drab uniforms sported by Kit and Gert. Then she flung open the imperial closet, revealing a whole Savile Row tailor’s line of officers’ uniforms, one for every branch of the Allied powers, and each one fitted to Dietrich’s svelte form. These were the clothes she wore to the front, a sort of reverse mufti, saving the beaded gowns and swan’s down coat for performances.

  For the next couple of hours the women played dress-up with the military gear—Gert a general, Kit an admiral, Dietrich a Marine commandant, all of them merrily prancing and strutting. I can almost hear their laughter spilling out through the French doors to Place Vendome, the bronze column in the center commemorating a victory over Germans of another era. The Joint Chiefs in drag, as it were.

  This was lesbian history of a very high order indeed. The image of the cross-dressed women wouldn’t leave me, and was more erotic the more I thought of it. Three weeks later, when I started to work in earnest on my novel, the scene at the Ritz went into the story as part of the legend of my heroine—an aging chanteuse who was clearly based on Dietrich. Yet all my baroque imaginings were pretty weak tea compared to the reality—Dietrich the famous bisexual, notorious by then for the parade of lovers both men and women, the generals and the duchesses. She was more out than almost anyone in Hollywood, so confident was she of her vast unshakable womanhood. The opposite of Kit, with her backstage marriage to Guthrie and her offstage lesbian friends.

  Indeed, I could hardly keep them all straight. Once I met an old actor who’d been in several Cornell productions, whose jowls quivered with passion as he waxed about Kit’s genius. When the tone had finally lowered to dish, he talked of Gert and Kit as inseparable, then laughed about poor Guthrie, who was ever losing his heart to men who wouldn’t love him back—ambitious young actors and hustler types who hung around for a while for the sake of the caviar, leaving Guthrie desolate in the end. Since he knew so much, I asked h
im offhandedly about this Nancy Hamilton woman, the one with the binoculars.

  Ah, but Nancy Hamilton was the second great love of Kit’s life—the one who came after Gert. Hearing it, I felt a peculiar defensive pain on Gert’s behalf, and couldn’t figure out how Gert could stay so close after being supplanted. Her small pavilion among the trees at the edge of the bluff at Sneden’s—another house pointedly built for one—was not far from the “big house” where Kit and Guthrie had lived. On Martha’s Vineyard Gert had bought the tiny fisherman’s shack, after which Kit and Guthrie had grandly acquired the whole nearby point. Perhaps they were all just very grown up, willing to let their relationships elide and change, a loyal troupe no matter who was sleeping with whom. In any case Kit was the queen, the others her ladies-in-waiting. Or maybe courtiers is the better word.

  I couldn’t ever ask Gert to clarify, it would have been overstepping my bounds. She appeared to harbor not the slightest shred of regret or bitterness when it came to Kit’s memory. She was keeper of the flame, after all; ever the more so, the more the world forgot. She didn’t seem lonely in the least, anymore than she ever seemed regretful. The past had done the best it could with the compromises required to live in it, and there was no purpose in changing the rules now. Let the dead rest, for the theaters they had lit up with their names were all dark anyway.