Milking the Moon (29 page)

She had flown the coop and liked to have fun a lot and then always had an abortion afterwards. The pregnancies were not by her husband. Oh dear, no. These were by fun people. She and Tom had a kind of loose latticework marriage. It was not a brick house. It was a loose latticework summer cottage. But she did not take precautions of any kind. And once I went as her knight of the white rose to escort her to an abortion, and then afterwards to a restaurant for her to sip champagne and eat a roast beef sandwich. It was her third time. I took her to a café neither of us had been to, some other café far away from our usual bailiwicks. She wanted champagne and cheer. She wanted to be entertained. I did my best.

But I respected her. Having a little abortion now and then did not change the fact that she was genuinely a lady in the old-fashioned sense. And what is that? you ask. Well, part of it is the generous point of view. You give the benefit of the doubt to one and all until you’re proven wrong, and then you retract your sympathy. She came later to live in Rome. She tried to convince her husband to take a year there. He said maybe later. She said now. So she just moved to Rome. We had a lot of fun. She was just very special.

*

Everybody turned up sooner or later at the Café de Tournon. My darling Jean Garrigue came shortly after I got there. Like ’52, maybe. She caught Paris fever from my excitement during my preparation. She’d always planned to come and never made any arrangements, and then suddenly there were a lot of people she knew over there—other writers. She lived in my hotel for a while, and then she lived up the street for a while. She wrote a novel called
The Animal Hotel
which is partly based on the Hôtel Helvétia.

She was absolutely queer for animals, all animals. She had fallen in love with the bird market in Paris, and she had these rosy-colored birds in her room. You could go up and down the stairs in the Hôtel Helvétia and hear twittering birds.

Francine du Plessix was part of the crowd at one moment. Her daddy was one of the founders of
Vogue.
She was a friend of George’s, part of that New York set that he knew. She was very, very beautiful and very, very French. Tiny waist, broad fanny, slim ankles, high heels. Exquisite coif, exquisite clothes. And educated beyond belief.

Alan Lomax came and stayed awhile. He had many versions of “The Jolly Tinker,” but I had some that he didn’t have, and so we would sit there and I would be singing “The Jolly Tinker” in one corner while Bee Dabney and Catherine Morison described the Dior show they’d seen that afternoon. It was great. One day I looked at Daphne Athas, Sally Higginson, and Catherine Morison sitting at a table together at the Tournon, and I thought, Oh, God, I wish I had a painting of this. Not a photograph. Only a great painter could do justice to the psychologies involved.

Then there was Christopher Logue, the English poet. I met him through Princess Caetani; someone had sent him to her—John Lehmann, maybe. He became part of the Tournon crowd. The
Paris Review
published a suite of his poems in which precious stones speak in the first person. He was disheveled and rather dirty looking in the way of young Englishmen of the period. Tweedy. A little stinky. He was always tough and always making a fuss. He was thoroughly outrageous, but I liked him. I would put him in my zoo of rare beasts. He had no money and survived entirely on what the princess gave him when she bought poetry from him. I think she slipped him some bits now and then.

And he also wrote some things for Maurice Girodias, who had the semiporn Olympia Press. All of the starving poets of Paris had written semiporn novels under other names. I had been approached by Girodias, but I was writing my own novel. Well, years later, in Milan, where I was shooting a scene for a film, I was strolling by this newsstand and I saw a familiar green Olympia Press cover. I went and looked at it, and there was a porn story by Eugene Walter. I opened it and knew from the first paragraph who wrote it. I put it back and said, No, I will not contribute one penny of royalty to that wicked Christopher Logue.

Evan Connell, the novelist, whom I absolutely adored, was part of the crowd. He was a friend of George Plimpton’s—a delightful person. He was from Iowa or someplace like that; everybody liked him because he was for real. We had some fascinating conversations about life in America. This is before he published the Bridge novels; he was talking about provincial life in America and how they are out of touch with the sun, the moon, and the rest of the world. I was always determined to get him to laugh because he looked like an old Hamlet. There’s a picture of me making a fool of myself, dancing in the street. I finally got him to smile this shy smile, and you see he’s a young man. He’s not an old Hamlet.

I remember one day looking up from my Dubonnet at the Café de Tournon and seeing about ten people busy writing, staring into spaces, sipping endless black coffees or aperitifs. One was William Gardner Smith, the bestselling black novelist. He was very successful and very much spoken of. I don’t know where he was from, but he had that sort of Central Africa look: a dark chocolate round face. He laughed a lot; he was one of the laughing spirits of the Tournon. One of the great moments was the morning that Vilma Howard, the charming and gifted black girl from Davis Avenue, and Renata Fitzhum, the Finnish art historian with very pale skin and pale hair, had a giggle fit together at the Tournon. They knew that William Gardner Smith was not in his room. So they went to his hotel and got in his bed—his little ole single bed—and pulled the cover over their heads. And when he opened this tiny bedroom door in this tiny hotel, this tiny bed was quivering with giggles. He ripped off the covers and there was Davis Avenue and Helsinki.

Alfred Chester was another character. He was a very gifted writer who was always hanging around the
Paris Review,
and I sent him to meet Princess Caetani. I think I took one of his manuscripts to show her. We published his first things in
Botteghe Oscure.
He’d had a fever as a child which left him without a single hair on his body. He had a good red wig, but people were nervous around him without knowing why. It was because he had no eyelashes and no eyebrows. Then he went off to North Africa and became part of that set with Paul and Jane Bowles: creatures that just got loose. They wanted to have hashish and many kinds of sex. They were all polysexual. Girls, boys, camels, watermelons. He was an innocent who’d been raised closely by a Jewish family in New York. I think he’d just never seen the greater world. Paris was one step out, and then North Africa was the full step out from the closed world to the open world. He committed suicide in the Middle East; that was the final step.

Amidst all of this there turned up an amazing creature. It was Gurney Campbell. Her family owned these fabric mills in Carolina, and she was very, very wealthy. Her husband was also, I believe, not exactly broke. She was enormously fat, but extraordinarily well dressed. Instead of being a fat lady pretending to be slim, she was a fat lady pretending that she liked good cloth and good jewelry. She and Daphne Athas wrote a play called
Sit on the Earth,
and everybody said, “Gurney, a plump girl like you shouldn’t write a thing saying sit on the earth.” I think she changed the title. Later she wrote that trilogy of plays about Gandhi.

Every Saturday night she did these readings at her apartment where all kinds of people read from their work. They were great fun. Once she had in Julia Randall, this serious poet. I saw at once that her braids were false, so I pulled them off. I put the braids on Gurney, and everybody laughed and giggled. The poor girl whose braids they were, she fled. She was too serious for that party. She’d been de-tailed, to some other task. Jean Garrigue wore the braids as a mustache. Then I wore the braids as a tail for two days. I walked through the Latin Quarter with Lady Angela Lady holding my tail.

Lady Angela Lady was an African princess who lived on this island off the Gold Coast which her family had owned since prehistory. She had come to Paris to study dressmaking. She always wore this red sari and red felt bedroom slippers set with broken mirror and rough-cut emeralds. (Now that’s style.) I met her at the party given by the Aga Khan. So many of the people from Harvard and Boston said, “Well, do we dare invite Eugene to the party with this black girl because he’s from Alabama?” And of course, we fell into each other’s arms. They had three kinds of monkeys on that island where her family lived, including the kind called King of the Monkeys, which I had never heard of. Even though it’s not the biggest monkey or the brightest monkey, all of the monkeys will do obeisance, bow, curtsey, and wait on this King of the Monkeys. If he comes into a group of three or four kinds of monkeys all picking little white slugs out of deadwood, they’ll all stand back for the King of the Monkeys to come right up and help himself. So in the lobby of the plaza at that party in Paris, Lady Angela Lady was squatting down in her red sari and showing me how the King of the Monkeys does on her island. On the other side of the lobby, all these Bostonians and Harvards were just looking. They couldn’t believe what they were seeing.

James Broughton was a part of all this. He’d been raised in San Francisco and belonged to that filmmaking group that included Curtis Harrington. I think he was in New York to do a program when I first met him. Then he turned up in Paris, and I introduced him to everybody I could. He was usually among the last few who closed the café at night. About two A.M. the weary waiter, Charles, would start sweeping up cigarette butts and making cheerful insults about “these bohemians.”

Never a dull moment. You can imagine what a cross section of the world it was. It was all immensely young and fun in this establishment which was literary salon, permanent editorial board meeting, message center, short-order eatery, debating club, and study hall. There were several literary reviews in English, one in French, and who knows how many books and other works springing forth from this noisy, smoky, clattery, raunchy, beat-up café.

*

We were doing something; we had a project. But we had no committees. We had no bookkeepers. We had no timekeepers. And we had no business managers. I think there was a New England girl that we called business manager. And there was a very tough Jewish girl from New York we called business manager at a different moment. But those were delightful individuals who were as much involved in the whole aspect of the magazine. I mean, it was certainly not my job to put up posters, but I probably put up more posters than anybody else in the group because, coming from Mobile, I realized the value of word of mouth: the little leaflet and the poster. There still is something human about those. Radio, television, and the paid ad still do not have the immediacy of the little handout, the word of mouth. If you are sitting next to the matron from Kansas City in the Tournon or the Deux Magots in summer, and you have the new number of the
Paris Review
in your hand, and you say—not to her, to the person at your table—”Have you seen this new issue?”…well, she might be a schoolteacher and she might go right to that newsstand and buy it.

Word of mouth comes first. Let’s say the Municipal Auditorium is burning down. Bombed, I hope; it’s so ugly. Burning down. Okay. A siren goes; nobody moves. Somebody beats a gong: boing, boing, boing: emergency. Nobody goes. Somebody does something else. Nobody goes. And then somebody leans out of a window and yells,
“FIRE!” E
verybody runs. Word of mouth. The voice on the radio will never have the same impact. You might hear on the radio that somebody let off a little bomb at Westminster Abbey. But the lady who was passing on a bus and runs to her next-door neighbor and says, “You won’t believe it! I saw it with my own eyes! I was on the top deck of the number twelve, going from Chelsea Circle to Blackbird Lane, and I saw these guys leave a picnic basket in the front portal of Westminster Abbey, and it blew up!” And they could say on the radio, “A bomb believed to be perhaps a protest against the annexation of Ireland by Her Majesty’s government caused minor damage to the west portal of Westminster Abbey today.” It’s that word of mouth that still gets attention in a way the BBC doesn’t. I’m sorry; that’s the way it is.

So I took posters around Paris to hang up. I addressed envelopes. I guided interesting manuscripts to them. I did a little of everything. Everybody who worked with the
Paris Review
did everything from emptying wastebaskets to serious study of manuscripts. We were busy trying to scrape up enough to get it through the press and pay the postage always. Everybody worked for nothing, and nobody expected anything.

When it looked as if it was going to go broke at the end of the first year, the Sadruddin Aga Khan popped in at the right moment and picked up the printing bill, bless his heart. The Harvard boys had known him at Harvard.

His father, the Aga Khan, was a delightful creature. He spent a lot of time in Paris. He was kind of London/Paris/Monte Carlo. He had more money than anybody could use in one lifetime. Once every year, his faithful subjects would give him gold equal to his weight. We’d see the newsreels of this huge Aga on these scales. These people would be sweating to crank it off the ground so the needle would say how much he weighed. Like three hundred. Then they’d stack up the gold bricks. I had one delightful conversation with the Aga once. He said, “You know, I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I really started writing short stories when I was very young.” He gave me one of his short stories to read, and I took it to the
Paris Review
and said, “We ought to publish this because his son is paying for the magazine.” But he died not very long thereafter.