Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (34 page)
Authors: justin spring
Tags: #Gay & Lesbian, #Social Science, #College teachers - Illinois - Chicago, #Gay authors, #Literary, #Human Sexuality, #Novelists; American - 20th century, #General, #Sexology - Research - United States - History - 20th century, #Psychology, #Artists; Architects; Photographers, #Body Art & Tattooing, #Authors; American, #College teachers, #Gay authors - United States, #Steward; Samuel M, #Tattoo artists, #Pornography - United States - History - 20th century, #Novelists; American, #Gay Studies, #Authors; American - 20th century, #Education, #Art, #Educators, #Pornography, #20th century, #Tattoo artists - New York (State) - New York, #Sexology, #Poets; American, #Literary Criticism, #Poets; American - 20th century, #Biography & Autobiography, #Teaching Methods & Materials, #Biography
Some money [to cover her expenses] came from a group of her old friends who could afford it—Virgil Thomson, Carl Van Vechten, Doda Conrad, Thornton Wilder, Donald Sutherland, and Janet Flanner. Once in a while one of the pictures in the collection disappeared; the royalties from her books were certainly not enough to keep her in the grand style to which she had long been accustomed…To protect and preserve this deep friendship…I did everything I could for her, and she reciprocated by loving me in the gentle fashion that a woman in her eighties can bestow on a person three decades younger.
Not wanting to visit Paris alone, Steward invited a handsome young Chicago ballet student named Allan Mayle
*
along as his companion. The two were astonished upon their arrival by the extreme dark, damp, and cold of Paris in December, and in their desire to heat their garret room at the Hotel Recamier nearly poisoned themselves with a hastily purchased butane gas heater.
Steward was sorry to see how Toklas had aged in the five years since their last meeting, for her mind as well as her body seemed to have slowed down considerably, and as a result her conversations with Steward were nowhere near as interesting as they had once been. In fact, she sometimes seemed to Steward almost a caricature of her previous self:
Alice is much feebler, walks very slowly, and with a cane. I am always a little shocked to see how much she
diminishes
between the times that I see her; she…is terribly humpbacked now, and
weeny
—to use a word that she herself used so much this time—and her mustache is heavier. She wears a kind of down over-the-ears cloche of fur, and with the glasses, the astrakhan coat (weighs pounds! I don’t see how she supports it!) and the cane, she looks exactly like a black troll.
The sensual pleasures Steward had known in Paris during the summer of 1952 were not easily recaptured with Allan Mayle in the winter of 1957, particularly since the young dancer, however talented he may have been in bed, was largely oblivious to the beauty of the city and had a tendency to engage in endless, mindless chatter. “I must confess I had looked forward to seeing Paris somewhat through Allan’s eyes,” Steward wrote in his journal, “but the empty-headed little idiot might as well be living in Pumpkin Center, Ohio, for all he reacts to Paris…Where are the old magics that I used to feel? Gone? Or moved to Rome?”
Steward’s next day consisted mainly of a four-and-a-half-hour visit for tea and gossip with Toklas, which included the news that “she is no longer seeing Francis [Rose] at all, having said to him that she appealed to him twice in the name of Gertrude, and wouldn’t again…She also said that Jean Cocteau, who…always makes a fetish of
laisser-vivre
, went so far as to send a note to Bernard Faÿ and say ‘you must NEVER see Francis Rose!’ which is going pretty far, for Monsieur Cocteau.” More important, however, Toklas gave Steward some advice:
Amongst the things [Alice] told me was to write the tattoo [book], and be real about it; that reality would carry it, even without plot and love interest. She also counseled me to go to Italy with tattooing, and said, “they laugh a lot there, that’s where all the gaiety has gone, not in France any more, people are too grim.” And she’s largely right about that. She was of the opinion that I could develop a “smart” clientele in Italy, in addition to the “bad boys” one—me, I’m not so sure.
A couple of days later, Steward ditched Mayle (who was suffering aftereffects of carbon monoxide poisoning from the butane heater, and confined to bed) to spend Christmas Day alone with his old flame Jacques Delaunay, now a well-established lawyer in Paris. The two dined together at Brasserie Lipp. There, eating Christmas dinner in a restaurant, Steward was amused to discover that the specialty of the legendary brasserie was nothing more than “sauerkraut and wieners, just like Ohio.”
In the days that followed, Steward had a long visit with Julien Green, during which “we talked a lot about Prok, and tattooing—[Green] thinks maybe I could make dialogues of the [journal] material.” He also visited Rudolph de Rohan again, to have photographs taken of his new rose garland tattoo. Through Pick, Steward was given an introduction to Cocteau’s lover and supporter, the film star Jean Marais. Steward, who had idolized the handsome French actor for years, came away from the meeting starstruck.
On Sunday Jacques Delaunay came by again. This time, as a favor to Allan Mayle, Steward pushed the two men into each other’s arms and simply retired to another room to read. Upon emerging from the bedroom, Delaunay then attempted to initiate something with Steward, but “evidently the continued excitement had been too much for Jacques and worn him down…we finally gave it up as a bad job [and] went and had a pizza.”
At lunch with Julien Green the next day, Steward shared a realization with the author. As Steward wrote in his journal, “Julien [was] as polite and impeccable as always, and speaking so low that sometimes one could barely understand him. He…told me of the sad discovery he had made when he was 40, namely, that ‘pleasure doesn’t really make one happy,’ a discovery (alas!) that I had made even before I was forty.” Steward had a similarly melancholy epiphany while lunching several days later at La Mediterranée with Toklas. A simple workman, recognizing her and knowing of her long association with Gertrude Stein, briefly expressed his reverence and admiration for both women, then bent and kissed her hand. Steward was suddenly overwhelmed, for “all the past, and the perspective of a half century moved into the place, and I realized just who and what this old lady was…and I started to weep…every time I would begin to get myself in hand, the damned workman would pass through the room again, and off I’d go. Alice was quiet for a long time following his charming speech, and I imagine she too was thinking of the old days.”
Steward’s awareness of his advancing age was confirmed by the finished set of photographs taken by Rudolph de Rohan of Steward standing bare-chested, showing off his rose-garland tattoo. In them, Steward seemed smaller and less fit than in previous years, and his face looked older, paler, and more tired. “As I suspected, they were not so good as they were five years ago, and whose fault is that?” Steward wrote in his diary. “Ah, well, we age indeed. Still, they [are] ‘documentary’ as far as my tattoo [is] concerned, and fair enough.”
•
Steward caught a cold during his last days in Paris that grew much worse on the flight home, “bloom[ing] into a gaudy monstrous thing, with fever and all the rest, and myself sick as a dog by the time we got to New York.” The chest infection subsequently turned into a pneumonia so debilitating that only by February 6 was Steward able to get out of bed without extended coughing fits. Even during the worst of the siege, however, Steward continued to see his “regulars” for sexual encounters—for despite the real danger to his health, he worried that in turning down any of these men even once, he might lose contact with them—a loss that, considering his advancing years and ever-diminishing sex appeal, he simply could not afford.
Having received so much encouragement from Toklas and Green, Steward returned to his tattoo journal with renewed enthusiasm, describing not only his customers and daily activities, but also his various new sexual partners, including a “negro with the unbelievable name [of] Ruffian Bellows Jr.” whom he had recently hired as a five-dollar hustler. But his recent illness made him ever more cautious about disease: “Soon as he left, I got to worrying about why (he said) they wouldn’t take his blood [at the blood bank], and wondering if he had syphilis. [My old friend] Doc Anthony used to tell me: ‘either stop fucking or stop worrying,’ and I guess I should.” Though Steward was strongly attracted to Bellows (“Lovely, satiny dark-brown skin. Quite a line of chatter, mostly beat”), he could not stop worrying about the possibility that he was a carrier of venereal disease, and his feelings about Bellows changed considerably when he learned several days later that Bellows had recently been treated for gonorrhea. Steward’s fear was not only of another infection, but also of becoming too visible to police and city health authorities, for Roy Robinson (who had recently discovered he had tertiary syphilis) had been compelled to report Steward as a sex contact at the local venereal disease clinic just a month earlier. Since Chicago health officials were now seeking to shut down tattoo shops under any pretext, Steward wanted his name and address kept out of their records. Even so, during his last meeting with Bellows, Steward heard a story from him that made him laugh so hard he wrote it down afterward in his journal:
He told me one fine tale about a fag who “hired” him one night. The guy made [Ruffian] take the belt out of his trousers and beat him with it, and then go into the bathroom and pee all over him, and finally, kiss his wife who’d been watching this all along and signalling to Ruffian to beat her husband harder. Ruffian was about to leave when the guy said wait, here’s your money, and Ruffian said, “Whuffo you pays me for beatin’ you? Why dat?” and the man said of course, and come again, and Ruffian said, “Whuffo? What kind of mens are you?” and the mens said, “I don’t know.”
Steward’s laughter was the laughter of self-recognition, for he had been posing a similar question to himself—almost daily, and for years—on nearly every page of his journals.
•
More and more, Steward wanted to turn his endless ruminations about his sexual activities into some sort of publishable work, perhaps by incorporating these real-life events into sexually themed fiction. But while a good deal of erotic fiction was being published commercially in Paris in 1956—primarily by the Olympia Press—none of it described male homosexual sex. Steward’s only means of publishing homoerotic fiction in the United States at that moment would have involved self-publishing privately (and illegally), and then distributing the work privately (which would have been even more dangerously illegal). His other alternative was to tone down the erotic content of his writing and publish it as erotically suggestive pulp fiction. But pulp fiction publishers routinely required authors to pathologize and denounce homosexuality in any fiction describing it—and Steward was opposed to doing anything of the sort.
*
One of the few literary journals then interested in publishing prohomosexual short fiction was the trilingual Swiss homophile publication
Der Kreis
, to which Steward had been contributing illustrations since 1954. He had learned of the magazine through Kinsey in 1952, just as it began publishing contributions in English, and had met one of its editors, Daniel Decure, that very same year in Paris. The magazine would achieve a peak circulation, in 1959, of 2,000 copies, with only 700 of those shipped outside Switzerland, and unfortunately for Steward, its editor in chief, Karl Meier (also known as “Rolf”), was strongly disinclined toward any content (fictional or otherwise) that was openly sexual. But the editorial policy for fiction at
Der Kreis
began to change slightly after Rolf appointed a German-born English-language editor named Rudolf Burckhardt
*
in 1955.
An even greater problem for Steward in writing homosexual erotic fiction was his continuing ambivalence toward his fellow homosexuals—those for whom, presumably, he would be writing. Indeed, some of his journal entries about homosexuals are so deeply loathing as to seem almost irrational. On February 17 he noted, “[Today I tattooed] the 14th queer I’ve tattooed in three years—out of 8900 pieces put on. I am really glad that h[omosexuals]’s don’t get decorated; if they hung out in my shop, my business would be ruined. As it was, two punks eyed the fruit strangely, and laughed at him after he’d gone. I was, of course, heavily on their side as they did.” (Steward’s dislike of the “fruit” was not based on the man’s sexual preference, however, but rather on his overt effeminacy.) A week later, Steward once again made note of his ambivalence toward homosexuals in noting the return of a homosexual couple who had been to his tattoo parlor previously: Rich, a boxer who was in the merchant marine, and Jack, his older, Ivy League lover. Steward placed a pair of bluebirds on Rich’s chest and a tiger’s head on one of his shoulders while Jack looked on approvingly. Steward hated the experience, for he disliked proprietary relationships between affluent homosexuals and their “bought” boys, and moreover had come to think of male homosexual “couples” of any sort as being embarrassingly unnatural. As he later wrote in an editorial piece for
Der Kreis
, “the invert, it seem[s] to me, should live alone and learn to like it, and to be self-sufficing.”
Steward was now having sex regularly with a new partner, a former Nazi stormtrooper named Gerhard (soon to be “Gary”) Stroh. His fascination with Stroh’s Nazi past spoke to his long-standing desire to have sex with brutalizing authority figures, a desire that had increasingly colored his fantasies of the past year, as well as coming to dominate his actual sex life—for apart from Stroh, the partners he most preferred were men like Bill Payson who would physically abuse him and verbally degrade him during sex. At the same time, however, Steward continued to feel a desperate romantic longing for the relatively innocent younger men who frequented his tattoo shop, even (or particularly) those with whom no sexual relationship whatever would be possible. While the two kinds of longing may have seemed at first glance to be entirely opposite, they were, in fact, variations on the same masochistic theme of rejection and deprivation. Describing an afternoon spent with a handsome young heterosexual sailor who had a long-stemmed rose tattoo on his right hip bone, Steward noted that after applying a new tattoo, the two had sat and talked awhile, and