Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (33 page)

During that summer of 1956, Steward sensed he was being staked out again by spies from the Naval Training Station. But in the end no naval authorities harassed him. Instead, toward the end of a highly profitable summer, he had an unexpected and entirely devastating setback. In his journal for Saturday, August 25, he noted simply: “Damn, damn, and double goddamn. Prok died today, of complications of heart and pneumonia. I am too cold to think.”

Throughout the upheavals of the last six years, Kinsey had remained fixed in Steward’s mind as someone who understood him and sympathized with him. Through his association with Kinsey, Steward had felt he was participating in something greater than himself, something that gave his life significance and meaning. He had composed his journals, kept his sex calendars, and maintained his Stud File with Kinsey firmly in mind as his ideal reader. As a result, Kinsey had become the most important person in his life by far—and now Kinsey was no more. “I am still frozen with shock,” Steward wrote in his journal three days later. “The sense of loss is stronger than I have ever felt…I wanted to cry Sunday evening, but was too numb. I can’t even find words to write about it.”

Along with the personal loss of Kinsey himself—who had been for Steward not only a friend, but also a mentor, a confidant, and an adviser—Steward now faced another loss: of his own sense of importance. Kinsey, after all, had been Steward’s one connection to the world of sex research. Set adrift from Kinsey and his monumental work, Steward now wondered what he was doing and who he was doing it for. His journals, diaries, photographs, and statistics had all been intended for Kinsey. A week after Kinsey’s death, Steward confided in his journal,

Steward reiterated this last hope many years later in his memoirs:

With Kinsey’s death, a distinct period of Steward’s own life was coming to a definitive close. In the past six years Steward had reached out to the larger artistic community of New York and Paris; he had also left the safety of the teaching life for the far riskier life of the artist, business entrepreneur, and sex enthusiast. At midlife he had dared (as few in life ever dare) to begin his life entirely anew, starting over on his own terms. But what intellectual direction his brave and adventurous new life would take, now that Kinsey was gone, was something Steward had yet to decide.

Devastated by Kinsey’s death, Steward ceased his journal. It was not until over a year later, on November 14, 1957, that he uncertainly began writing in it again, and in doing so he noted the many significant changes that had taken place in his life since he had stopped:

Steward had had many sexual contacts during the past year, and he cataloged them all in his very long first journal entry, which concluded, “Most of all at present…I enjoy [the black bodybuilder] Bill Payson…It is his attitude of semi-cruelty, you might say, that I like; not cruelty exactly, but more a feeling of ‘This is what you deserve, white boy; you scorn me because I’m a nigger, and here I am, shoving this big black tool right down in you, fucking you in the ass; that’ll show you what I think of you.’…and man—does he.”

Before Kinsey’s death, Steward had felt he was doing something greater in his journal than simply gloating over his various sexual escapades, something that would serve humanity in general by serving Kinsey in particular. But now, a year after Kinsey’s death, Steward was struggling with a sense of futility, for apparently he was once again back where he had started—keeping a diary of assorted sexual exploits for not much more than his own satisfaction and amusement. As a result, he struggled daily with an overwhelming sense of abandonment, hopelessness, and loss. Alice Toklas, knowing all too well what it was like to lose someone larger and more important than oneself (for she had been trying since 1946 to redefine her place in the world after the loss of Gertrude Stein), had been gently encouraging him for some time to think once again of writing for publication, asking him, “Isn’t there any newspaper that pays little but more than nothing for the things you can do so very well—so naturally like the Sparrow of the dental review—less local with subjects of a wider field.” Perhaps hoping to supply Steward with a little bit of “humor and diversion” of her own, she then shared with him her latest story about Sir Francis Rose, which she described, only half ironically, as “Francis and his international scandal.”

Rose’s “scandal” began while spending a boozy weekend in Portsmouth, England, with his old friend Lionel Kenneth Philip “Buster” Crabb.
^*
Crabb was a retired Royal Navy commander who had been a pioneering undersea diver of the 1930s; beginning in the war years, he had been one of Rose’s favorite ne’er-do-well drinking buddies, and in fact they had briefly roomed together.
^*
Though by 1956 Crabb was forty-seven, out of shape, and deeply alcoholic, he had nonetheless managed to conduct a surreptitious underwater inspection of the Russian cruiser
Sverdlov
while the ship was docked in England. The success of this mission (Crabb had seen and described the ship’s innovative steering propeller) had subsequently led MI6 to ask him to spy on the hull of the Russian cruiser
Ordzhonikidze
, which had just brought General-Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and Premier Nikolai Bulganin to Britain on a state visit. The day of the ship’s arrival in Portsmouth was the last day Crabb was seen alive; ten days later, British newspapers reported his death in a diving accident, giving no specific details.

Upon Crabb’s mysterious death,
^*
Rose had left England and attempted to hide out at his little
chambre de bonne
apartment on Ile St. Louis—but not before telling a reporter that he had received a mysteriously phrased note from Crabb the day he died. As a result, Rose suddenly found himself being stalked by British intelligence, Russian intelligence, French police, and legions of tabloid reporters. His Paris apartment was broken into soon after he arrived and the mysterious note from Crabb was reportedly stolen; subsequently Rose’s “son” Luis was arrested and detained without charges in the French prison at Saint-Quentin. Hounded relentlessly by newspapermen, French plainclothes police, and the KGB, Rose had a mental breakdown. His estranged wife, Lady Frederica, arrived shortly thereafter from her home on Corsica, packed up his things and brought him back to England, and there deposited him at the former Holloway Sanatorium at Virginia Water for psychiatric observation. So began a cycle of breakdown, institutionalization, and release that would continue, on and off, for the rest of Rose’s life.

Steward’s existence, by comparison, had been relatively uneventful over the past year. There had been one great upset in the fall of 1956, when police had raided and shut down the Sportland Arcade for showing illegal (and highly profitable) pornographic films on its antiquated peepshow machines. As a result of the closure, Steward had lost his kiosk workspace. He had needed to find himself another space very quickly, before his business began to suffer, and so he had settled almost immediately on a shop front across the street, a former barroom and speakeasy “that Al Capone had frequented, having [once] been enamored of a bar-maid [who worked] there.” Steward was able to rent the place on a month-by-month lease since the building, surrounded by vacant lots, was slated for eventual demolition as part of an urban renewal scheme.

The name Steward gave his new shop—“Phil Sparrow’s Tattoo Joynt”—was slyly playful. In choosing the Middle English spelling of
joint
, “joynt,” Steward quietly drew attention to the word and its various meanings—for while
joint
primarily describes a place where two bodies come together or join (which is itself sexually suggestive), it also described, in slang usage, a disreputable place of entertainment, a prison, a marijuana cigarette, or (most significantly for Steward) a phallus. And indeed the Joynt contained elements of all those things. Immediately after moving in, Steward walled off the rear section of the overly large space, thereby creating a private backroom area at the Joynt devoted entirely to sex, and featuring a cot, an easy chair, a waist-high workbench for “rough fucking,” and a toilet area rigged not only with a series of peepholes, but also a “glory hole” through which men could engage in anonymous oral sex.

While Steward’s own sex drive was waning, he remained entirely fascinated by the rough young men he now encountered daily. As he wrote in his journal,

In January of 1957 Chuck Liston, a particularly handsome young man who had once hung around the cage en route to a military school in South Carolina, returned to Chicago in uniform and came to visit Steward at his new shop. Liston was now a soldier, and in Steward’s opinion, “a more rugged American youth I’ve rarely seen.” Steward developed a powerful crush on him after seeing him in uniform, one he found extremely painful, for the young man was amiable and affectionate with him, but in no way interested in sex.

In the same entry in which he described his unrequited crush on Liston, Steward nonetheless noted starting a sex relationship with a highly intelligent former student of his at DePaul named Pete Rojas. He went on to observe that “making Pete was one of the most satisfying rewards I’ve had for quitting teaching, for I think I could not have let myself do it (nor would he have said yes) while that other relationship [of student to teacher] existed in the background.”

•

In his pursuit of sexual variety and adventure, Steward had become involved with some very troubled characters over the past year. Most notable among them was Roy Robinson, a six-foot-two, twenty-seven-year-old ex-con who had had all of his teeth removed in order to be fitted for dentures. While Steward thought Robinson an awful character, he was nonetheless fascinated by the extraordinary sensation of Robinson’s toothless mouth, which Robinson made available to him (in exchange for cash) on a regular basis. Years later, after paying Robinson to perform oral sex on him a total of 230 times in the back room of the tattoo parlor, Steward observed that Robinson was without a doubt

Writing, however, remained just as much on Steward’s mind as sex. During the year following Kinsey’s death, Steward’s friend James Purdy had established himself as a literary novelist by privately publishing
Don’t Call Me by My Right Name
and
63: Dream Palace
. The two novellas were subsequently published commercially in Britain, and then brought out in the United States (together) under the title
Color of Darkness.
With these publications, Purdy’s reputation would continue to grow, and he would receive both a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant and a Guggenheim fellowship to support him in his work a short time later. While Steward did not much care for Purdy’s writing and was consequently perplexed by its success, he was heartened by the thought that the dark, violent, and sexually charged urban scenes that Purdy described, so very close to the world in which Steward actually lived, described a world about which he, too, might eventually publish. Alice Toklas, who shared Steward’s basic indifference to Purdy’s writing, noted as well to Steward that Purdy had tried to manipulate her into writing positively on his behalf (she had met him several years earlier through both Steward and the Wilcoxes). “James Purdy bores me,” she now wrote Steward. “He asked me to write something about his latest effort…but I ignored his request and his book. He—his subject matter and his treatment of it lack taste.”

As he returned to his journal, Steward became ever more lyrical and introspective in his entries, in a way that suggested he was once again trying to find a way of turning his day-to-day experiences into some sort of publishable work. The experiences he had been chronicling in his journals were, after all, far more interesting than anything he had found in Purdy’s fiction. Even as he did so, however, he seems to have been using the journal for private reflection:

Apart from his journal writing, Steward was now actively mentoring several of these young men, including the heavily tattooed former classicist Bill Tregoz. On December 6, Steward noted, “Tregoz [was told by his boss that] he’d either have to sell [his] motorcycle or stop working there…[He and I] fell into a discussion that turned unwarrantedly serious, about the ‘suicidal urge’ in us that frequently goads us to destroy ourselves right when we seem to have the world by the tail.” Though Steward was wary of yet again involving himself with a charismatic young man who would ultimately abandon him, he saw enough of himself in Tregoz’s sufferings—for Tregoz was decidedly homosexual in orientation—to want to help him achieve greater self-understanding. A similar desire to help and advise would later inform Steward’s erotic fiction.

Business slowed as winter came on. By mid-December Steward noted being “lonesome down here at times, mainly because I have no continuing project…I just snooze and putter.” His sex life was less dynamic as well; in September of 1957, he hosted his twenty-ninth and final daisy chain. Since on some winter days Steward earned as little as three dollars at the tattoo parlor (tattooing was, it turned out, a seasonal business), he decided to close down over the Christmas holidays to visit Alice Toklas in Paris. She seemed to him in need of company, for she was elderly and, despite being surrounded by Gertrude Stein’s vast art collection, she was also very low on money. Moreover, when her new landlords bought the building at 5 Rue Christine in 1958, they had made no secret of wanting her out of her apartment. Of her late-life loneliness and recurring financial difficulties, Steward later wrote,