Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (20 page)

Steward recorded the experience on his index card for Miksche in the Stud File, observing that he had his first encounter with Miksche the day before filming began, on May 30, 1952. Notes at the bottom of the card read: “1 x 2 hrs px ACK; 5-31, 6-1,” meaning that the two-hour filming session involving Alfred C. Kinsey had taken place over May 31 and June 1. The note goes on to add, “Tall handsome sadist. Two pms
^*
of movies. Whoo!”
^*

•

Nine days later (but still aching and sore from Miksche’s brutalization), Steward wrote Kinsey a brief note from the Hotel Taft in New York: “It was an extremely enjoyable week-end, and I was especially glad to be able to spend some time in the library. We hope that our part in the experiences may have contributed somewhat, but we are still a bit dubious.”

Steward, who was only in town for three nights, spent two of them with Witold Pick’s Polish “cousin,” Johnny, the young man whom Steward had bedded in Paris the summer before, and then worried he had infected with gonorrhea. Johnny (who had not been infected and was not Pick’s cousin) had recently moved to New York. “He is really very sweet,” Steward wrote, “and even better looking than in Paris. He’s 28 now, lithe, blonde,
bien bâti
.”
^*

Tuesday the tenth, Steward went to Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescott’s apartment at 410 Park Avenue—for Wescott, though away, had provided Steward with an introduction to George Platt Lynes, the well-known dance and fashion photographer who had an ongoing intimate relationship with Wescott’s longtime partner and lover Monroe Wheeler. Lynes had arranged a small dinner party that night which included the playwright William Inge as well as a dazzlingly handsome young man named Ralph Pomeroy, who frequently modeled for both Lynes and Paul Cadmus.

Steward and Lynes hit it off immediately, in part because of their shared friendship with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (for the two ladies had mentored Lynes when he was an aspiring young writer in Paris), but also in part because both men were highly sexual, with many shared sexual contacts in the world of ballet. Steward later wrote of spending the hours after dinner “looking at Lynes incomparable nudes.” By the end of this long and pleasurable evening, the two men were fast friends; Lynes cordially offered to give Steward any number of his nude figure studies if only Steward would visit again when passing through New York at summer’s end. Steward thought the evening a very promising start to what he hoped would be his best Paris summer ever.

•

After a quick ocean crossing filled with a number of pleasant sexual interludes (one in particular, with a professor who had once dated Steward’s sister, seems to have bordered on romance), Steward arrived in Paris rested and refreshed, and spent his first day in St. Germain with Esther Wilcox and James Purdy at a fashionable café. He spent the next afternoon in bed with Jacques Delaunay. “We had a bit of
enculage
^*
and he has turned a little sadist,” Steward noted with satisfaction. Once again Steward had almost immediately found himself at cross-purposes in Paris, hoping at once to live the literary life of a novelist abroad, and at the same time to immerse himself in nonstop sex. At tea with Alice Toklas that afternoon he met up once again with Sir Francis Rose, who had of course been living a similar double life for many years, and the two once again hit it off enormously. The next night they had a tête-à-tête dinner together, predictably filled with sex talk and laughter. At the end of the evening, and at Steward’s urging, Rose “picked up a little snappy-eyed black-haired [teenager] named Luis,” Steward recorded that night in his diary. “Half-afraid, [Rose] wanted me to go home with him and the boy, but I said no, and off they went.”

Saturday brought another sexual adventure with an American artist acquaintance: Steward “was
sadique
with R. McCarthy…beat him, whipped him, twisted his nipples, put wrench on head of cock, pissed in his mouth…Took a shower, and left my watch there.” When the watch was subsequently turned in to the police for an advertised award, Steward paid far more than it was worth to get it back, for it had been a gift from George Reginato, his Chicago paramour, and so it had special significance to him.

The following Monday, Steward met up with Jacques Delaunay again, “but somehow all the old fire was lacking, as well it might be after what we went through two years ago.” After sex, however, Delaunay was kind enough to help Steward draft an elegantly phrased letter to the publisher Paul Morihien about the new translation of
Querelle
that Steward had shipped to Morihien several weeks earlier via air express. The next day, after sunbathing among the muscle boys of the Quai de Grenelle, Steward returned “to find a letter from Glenway [Wescott] arranging all sorts of things with Fr[ancois] Reichenbach (who called yesterday inviting me to see the Genet film), J[acques] Guerin, [Jean] Cocteau,
et al
. [But] Morihien probably won’t [attend].”

Reichenbach, a charming and amiable homosexual documentary filmmaker, had invited Steward to his apartment to view
Un Chant d’Amour
, the twenty-six-minute silent film that Jean Genet had recently made starring André (the hustler Steward had met in 1950 through Francis Rose) and another of his companions, Lucien Senemaud. Using shots of faces, armpits, and semierect penises, Genet had evoked a dreamlike series of erotic activities in a prison. Steward went to the screening, and there met Cocteau (who had been involved in the filming) and also Jacques Guerin, the wealthy businessman and arts patron who had financed the film. Steward briefly discussed his translation of
Querelle
with Guerin, who advised him to approach Genet about it directly. Steward seems not to have managed a word with Cocteau, however; he apparently became tongue-tied in the volatile artist’s presence, and was barely able to stammer out a few admiring remarks.

Sunday the twenty-ninth brought on a heat wave, so Steward stayed in his room writing post cards and only ventured out again the next day for sex with an artist, Jean Tsamis, followed by a cocktail party at the home of Francis Rose. He ended the night with more cruising. The following day he saw Max Ophuls’s new film of Schnitzler’s
La Ronde
, which impressed him deeply, and then had dinner with Pick. Later, over drinks at a café, “Francis, drunk and in
maillot barré
, joined us
au
Royal, a perfect ass and bore for two hours of talk of Luis.” Steward had propositioned Luis the previous afternoon and been turned down cold, so he had little patience for Rose’s increasingly obsessive talk of the young man, who was clearly moving in on Rose as a patron and sugar daddy. Steward concluded his journal that evening by noting yet another new prospect, a “crew-cut French boy.”

The boy, a nineteen-year-old named Jean Magriz, proved the next day to be “charming,
gentil, mâle
…[in bed] he reciprocated
un peu
—not enough to be displeasing…This makes up for a lot…he is the most lovely
beau gar
^*
that I’ve
ever
met in 4 trips to La Belle France!” But when Steward met him for dinner the day after their encounter, “something happened…[Jean suddenly] grew very sad—and almost wept. Back at the Reine [Blanche], he excused himself and went away, leaving me sitting there a bit dazed and not quite sure what happened.”

Sunday was a disappointment, for Steward was still disturbed by Magriz’s sudden disappearance the night before, and the Quai de Grenelle turned out to be far too crowded and hot for sunbathing. That evening, Magriz didn’t show up at the Reine Blanche, leaving Steward to wait out the evening by himself. Alone in a café later that night, Steward returned once again to his literary projects, writing notes to the filmmaker Kenneth Anger and the novelist Julien Green, two of the many artists and writers he still wanted to meet while in Paris. By the afternoon, however, his sadness over the loss of Magriz had deepened: “Maybe it’s time
now
to give up sex,” he wrote in his diary, “rather than wait two more years til I’m 45.”

On the eighth, Steward met with Morihien’s secretary, Mme. Baudoin, who informed him that “Morihien will not at this time take
Querelle
,” as he recorded afterward in his diary with some disappointment. Still, “she said [the novelist] Julien Green thought it superb, read every word of it,” and she suggested that, based on Green’s response, Morihien might eventually reconsider taking it on. That evening Steward had a date with Bob Martinson, the professor who had once dated Steward’s sister, and whom Steward had had a brief fling with during the Atlantic crossing. But Martinson “showed up with some little nance of a french teacher…from University of Pitt[sburgh], leaving me again dazed and hurt. Saw them later; we walked for a while and then I had Bob (the 2nd time that day for him, I fancy) but found I didn’t want him at all. There’s a limit.”

Several days after, Steward had word from Jacques Guerin, Genet’s patron, saying, “I must go to see Genet alone, and [he] sent me his address.” Steward seems, however, to have hesitated—afraid not of Genet, but rather of his cadre of thugs, about whom Steward had now heard a great deal from Francis Rose,
^*
for Genet was apparently angry Steward had undertaken an unauthorized translation of his novel. Steward later described the situation to an interviewer:

•

The professional rejection by Morihien, the sexual rejection by Magriz, and now the irrationally angry response from Genet all led Steward to ask himself in his diary, “Why go to Paris when you’re so successful in Chicago?”

On July 15 Steward’s mood lifted when he discovered that George Platt Lynes’s artist friend Paul Cadmus,
^*
who was just then on his way to Brittany from Rome, had by chance registered that morning at the Recamier. Steward left a note at the front desk asking him to lunch. Emmy Curtis had just arrived from Chicago, so Steward spent the morning looking after her, but he was free to meet with Cadmus at noon, and in the end the two had a long and pleasant meal. “We talked of many things—
argot
, Italy, painting. He says I will like Italy; it’s so ‘unbuttoned.’”

The next day Steward visited the novelist Julien Green. Like many Americans, Steward knew little about Green’s writing, for though born an American, Green had grown up in France and wrote in French. Along with Gide and Genet, he is today recognized as one of the three great figures of modern French literature to have given a substantial account of his homosexual life in his writing, even though he was strongly ambivalent about his homosexuality.

Throughout his life, Green struggled to reconcile his sexuality with his Catholic faith. In his earlier years, he had vacillated between recognizing the validity of his homosexual desires (at the urging of Gide) and, alternately, seeing homosexuality as sinful and wrong (at the urging of the dashing Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain, who had also “converted”
^*
Cocteau). Green had ultimately decided in favor of Catholicism, and in 1949 returned to the church. Nonetheless his interest in homoerotic imagery stayed with him; so, too, did his interest in anonymous sexual encounters. Like Gide, Green distinguished between those homosexual attachments that had an emotional foundation (which were acceptable) and those that were purely physical (and which were thus the work of the devil). As a result, he considered himself as existing within a fallen state, for quite apart from failing to answer a higher religious calling, he had failed even to put the indulgence of his sexual desires behind him with his return to Catholicism. Upon their first meeting, Green presented Steward with a first edition of
L’Autre Sommeil
(1930), his semiautobiographical novel of homosexual awakening.

At first the two men talked primarily about publishing. Like Steward, Green was acutely aware of the need to engage in a certain amount of sexual hypocrisy in his writing in order to be published; unlike Steward, however, he had long since reconciled himself to practicing that hypocrisy. “In hesitating to talk about the hero’s love for a young man, I falsify truth and seemingly conform to accepted morality,” he once noted in a journal entry; “it is behaving thus that one finally becomes a man of letters.”

All the same, Steward was delighted with Green, noting in his diary, “Green…is charming, quiet—
en est
,
^*
and said wonderful things about my translation…Much euphoria over this, and wrote at once to K[insey].”

His letter to Kinsey concerned a specific new project: