Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (22 page)

Several days later, Steward met and bedded an extraordinarily handsome young hustler named Carlo Monti. On the thirtieth of August he noted, “Carlo came [again] at noon…This time he took me for 5000 with some cock and bull story about a suit in hock. However…[that evening when we went out] Carlo looked wonderful in his ‘new’ grey flannel—arrogant, proud, with a wonderful carriage—
un vero Romano di Roma!
”

An evening later, Steward cruised the ruined Colosseum, for though regularly patrolled by police, it was then still open to the public, and well known for anonymous sex.
^*
Steward’s elation at his sexual success there did not last long, however, for the next day Monti “discolored my whole stay [in Rome] by stealing my wristwatch [after sex]—very cleverly, too.” Crushed at the loss of this cherished keepsake from George Reginato, Steward could only observe, “I’m thankful this didn’t happen on my first night here, or it would all have been very unpleasant. Still, it is only a minor emotional shock which will be cured by a little time passing.” He consoled himself, as usual, by meditating on the experience in his diary.

Steward spent his final days in Europe back in rainy Paris. On the fourth of September, he took leave of Alice Toklas, then picked up the
Querelle
manuscript at Morihien’s office and gave it to an expatriate friend who had promised to return it to Julien Green. Witold Pick and Georges Raveau, a waiter Steward had been seeing regularly for sex that summer, came down to the hotel to see him off. “I shed some tears going down the Blvd Raspail,” Steward noted, but “was done by the time we got to Place de la Concorde.”

By the end of the travel diary, Steward seems to have realized that his dream of living and writing in France was still very far from becoming a reality, and that moreover it probably never would. He had, after all, arrived in Paris that summer still thinking of himself as a promising young writer who would be welcome in any number of literary salons, and he had been particularly confident that his new translation of
Querelle
would open many doors. In short order, however, he had experienced the complete opposite. He was now at an impasse with both Paul Morihien and Jean Genet. Jean Cocteau, meanwhile, had thought very little of him at all, and despite Steward’s great admiration for the artist and poet, no friendship had resulted from their meeting. Most of the educated Parisian men Steward had met and attempted to bed had seemed, in retrospect, rather stuffy and dull to him: unduly complicated, formal, and sexually reserved. True, he had had some sexual success with Parisian tradesmen and waiters; but none had made too deep an impression. Rome and its men, by comparison, had been a revelation.

The problem, of course, was not with Paris, but rather with Steward himself, for during the 1952 visit he had finally started to realize that being an American tourist in Paris—however well one might speak French—was not quite the same as being a participant in French social mores and French literary culture. While Steward was by now basically fluent in the language, he was hardly capable of conversing with much subtlety or grace among the Parisian literati. And really, what was the point of doing so? Despite his decade-long study of the language, most of his friends that summer (apart from Jacques Delaunay) had been Americans or other visiting foreigners. Among the French writers he had encountered, only one—Julien Green, himself American-born—had authentically befriended him, and even then the two had conversed entirely in English. While Steward was doubtless capable of improving his French, he now wondered how long it would take—and with whom he would converse—and to what end he might want to do so. Apart from Genet, there was no one then writing in French he much cared to translate. Moreover, he had no intention of writing anything in French himself. For years, Steward had imagined himself as a Continental sophisticate, a Parisian flaneur with the tailored clothes and pencil mustache of a latter-day Adolphe Menjou. By the end of the summer, however, Steward was basically done with Paris; if anything, he much preferred Rome.

Steward’s 1952 diary chronicles, amid its many sexual adventures, a quiet change of heart. With that change of heart came a new energy and resolve. Though he was returning to the United States discouraged by his reception among the Paris literati, he was nonetheless doing so with a formidable set of new sexual statistics. Moreover, as he sailed back to the States, he felt ever more sure of himself and his projects. The encounters he had been pursuing so actively over the past few years now seemed to him no longer a distraction from his literary endeavors, but increasingly his central life focus—and perhaps, at some point, a topic on which he would write with real authority. Having sex, not writing, was now the thing he most wanted to do—and there were plenty of men waiting for him back in Chicago.

•

On the passage back to New York, Steward met and had a number of discussions about Catholicism with the French theologian Jacques Maritain, a friend to both Julien Green and Jean Cocteau. Steward had previously met Maritain through the translator and literary critic Charles du Bos, a French Catholic convert whom Steward had come to know better in Chicago, during the war, after du Bos had taken a position at Notre Dame University in South Bend. Though Steward had long since left the church, he still remained interested in the question of faith—and also in Maritain, who was handsome, brilliant, and utterly charismatic. Unfortunately, Steward did not relate the content of these conversations in his diaries, which were intended in large part for Kinsey.

New York, when Steward arrived, was the same wonderful adventure as ever. He noted briefly in his diary of September 11 that “John Leapheart—charming negro—came [to my hotel and] I did him. Then we had dinner, and he came back to the hotel, and [he] did me.” There were two other liaisons, but the highlight of the stopoff was the return visit to George Platt Lynes, toward whom Steward had already begun to feel a unique and extraordinary connection. In a fictional evocation of Lynes and his New York milieu, Steward would later describe attending a sex party with Lynes at about this time, but in fact their one evening together was spent mostly looking at Lynes’s art collection and photographs before going out to a bar. As Steward later noted,

The next day, after another rendezvous with Leapheart, Steward “saw Geo[rge] Lynes and met [one of his models, a weightlifter] from Boston.” He also noted he had “conned George [Lynes] out of about 35 pictures.” But in fact Lynes had offered Steward as many photographs as he cared to take away with him, and Steward, knowing of Lynes’s significant financial difficulties,
^*
would gladly have paid for them if only Lynes had allowed. Lynes would not; in taking money for nude male imagery, Lynes would have exposed himself to criminal prosecution, and despite his pending bankruptcy he was unwilling to take that sort of risk, even with Steward.

Before boarding the
Pacemaker
back to Chicago, Steward drafted a hasty note:

That fall Steward devoted himself more than usual to erotic letter writing with several acquaintances.
^*
He later noted that his new friendship with Lynes, which had intensified via such correspondence, was just then particularly important to him as he began another bleak year at DePaul, particularly since Lynes was such a fan of Steward’s erotic writing:

It was through these letters that Steward seems, finally, to have come into his own as a writer comfortable not only with the description of his sexual activities and interests, but also with himself as a person. When Lynes cautiously inquired if Leapheart might be a hustler, Steward wrote back,

During the fall Steward also concluded his negotiations with Paul Morihien, writing him a long letter in French suggesting the
Querelle
manuscript would remain available to him in Paris should he ever care to reconsider it.
^*

Steward heard no more from Morihien, but Lynes contacted him again in mid-October to thank him for the introduction to Leapheart, whom he described as “heaven,” and to introduce him in turn to Scott Douglas, a dancer with the Ballet Theater who in Lynes’s words had recently been “a three day wonder in my life.” (Douglas was just then on tour in Chicago.) At roughly the same time, Lynes mentioned in a letter to his friend the artist Bernard Perlin that Steward had just sent him a letter “typewritten over what appears to be a ‘dirty drawing’—somebody appears to be going down on what appears to be a sailor.” And, indeed, Steward had recently created several kinds of erotic stationery featuring Cocteau-inspired line drawings of two men having sex.

To Lynes, Steward’s total lack of discretion in sending such things through the mail was deeply alarming, for American anxieties about domestic communism and the postwar rise in sexual openness had merged during the early 1950s to create a violently antisexual (and particularly antihomosexual) culture. Most homosexuals now lived lives of great secrecy, discretion, and fear as politicians such as Senator Joseph McCarthy and political appointees like Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield made names for themselves by prosecuting anyone who dared to express publicly any interest whatsoever in sex. Summerfield had in fact recently launched a national crusade against what he termed “pornographic filth in the family mailbox” by persuading Congress to grant the post office sweeping powers to inspect and seize all mail that he and his censors considered obscene. Homosexuality was particularly targeted and vilified. The seizure of mail featuring perceived homoerotic content in many instances led to FBI surveillance of the recipients, harassment by federal, state, and local authorities, and public exposure of both sender and recipient for “sexual deviance.” Kinsey, Steward, and Lynes
^*
were all sharply aware of these dangers—and of the three, only Steward dared to flout the law.

When not drawing or writing about sex, Steward continued to pursue any man he found desirable. In 1951 a brilliant coming-of-age novel about a love affair between a teenager and a young man,
Finistère
, had been published in New York. Its author was Arthur Anderson Peters, publishing under the name of Fritz Peters. Steward had loved the novel; he also knew that Peters was the adopted nephew of Margaret Anderson, former editor of
The Little Review
,
^*
and that Peters had lived briefly with Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas before being taken in and raised by the Greek Armenian mystic Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. Steward therefore decided to track Peters down and bed him. As he described his actions to a poet friend in later life,

At age thirty-eight, Peters had just emerged from a nervous breakdown and was still quite fragile—in part because he was deeply alcoholic, and in part because his psychoanalyst had ordered him to abandon his homosexuality and live as a heterosexual. Moreover, Gurdjieff (who was essentially Peters’s adoptive father) despised male homosexuality, and his profound disapproval of Peters’s sexual orientation caused Peters lifelong unhappiness. As Steward later recalled, Peters “burst into tears about five minutes after he shot his wad, and began to drink even more [and to] rant about how he really wasn’t gay, and I became more and more impatient and he finally left, still teary, and me—I was also shaken and irritated…”

Shortly thereafter, Alice Toklas sent Steward some news about Francis Rose, who was having an equally difficult time: “[Francis] is in Portugal now…but before leaving he was in a good deal of trouble with Luis his
valet de chambre
boyfriend who he now says is his illegitimate son. Francis is saying that he is going to recognize [Luis] so that he will inherit the title!”
^*

Steward was immediately fascinated by the perversity of the discovery (particularly since he had been present when Rose first met Luis). He later gave an interviewer his own recollection of the Francis Rose–Luis Rose story:

Apparently Rose now hoped to recognize Luis as his son even while keeping him as a lover, an arrangement by which Luis would eventually gain Rose’s Spanish titles, and Rose, for his part, would keep the desirable young man tied to him permanently. But opinions were divided from the first about Rose’s “discovery” that Luis was his son, for it seemed an awfully convenient discovery. The painter George Melhuish, a longtime friend of Rose’s, later noted that Rose “had apparently convinced himself that his fantasy was fact, even though most of his friends, [myself] included, had serious doubts.”

Steward subsequently received a two-page letter from Rose in which Rose gave all the details of the discovery, explaining to him the circumstances of Luis’s birth and upbringing, expressing concern over his lack of discipline, but at the same time proudly noting how similar Luis was to him in so many ways. Rose’s story was this: He had quietly married into a noble Spanish family just before the Civil War, but his wife had died shortly after giving birth, and all the rest of her family (excepting his child) had then been murdered by “red Trotskyists.”
^*
(Frederica, Lady Rose, would later deny the veracity of Rose’s claim to have fathered Luis, as indeed would nearly everyone who knew him.)

Steward gleefully passed along to Lynes the jaw-dropping news about Rose having unwittingly bedded his son. Lynes immediately dismissed it as nonsense: “The tale of Francis Rose is too pipe-dream for me. Incest taboo, indeed!…Did you see Jimmy Hicks (Scott Douglas,
^*
I mean)? He wrote the other day that he had heard from you, that he meant to call.”

Lynes had enclosed a copy of his
Ballet Yearbook
with the note. In sending Lynes his grateful thanks for it, Steward replied, “No, alas, J[immy] H[icks] Scott Douglas never did call up, and I rather wish he had.” He then went on to add,

Lynes then sent Steward the nude study of Leapheart embracing the weightlifter from Boston as a thank-you for the introduction to Leapheart—who had turned out to be not just a good model, but also a kind and gentle young man who was also a skilled lover. Steward in turn thanked Lynes for the photograph in the way he knew Lynes would like best: by sending along some stories of his most recent sexual exploits. In the letter enclosing them, he wrote,

Lynes, after receiving several of Steward’s typed “stories” along with the letter, responded, “I wish I could write pornography as well (half as well) as you; it makes good reading. What do I do to encourage you? Is asking enough?”

Steward was hugely gratified by Lynes’s praise and encouragement. Coming from an established artist with his own broad range of erotic experience, Lynes’s suggestion that Steward was exceptionally good at erotic writing seems to have brought Steward to the realization that, whatever his previous failures as a literary novelist and man of letters, he might yet establish himself as a brilliant writer of homosexual smut. He wrote back,

Two weeks later, after receiving more nude photos from Lynes, Steward sent back a narrative calculated to arouse and give pleasure to his friend, and yet at the same time to reveal something quite personal about himself: