Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (48 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
Upon the book’s publication in July 1977, Steward wrote a note to his World War II army lover Sergeant Bill Collins, and another to Sir Francis Rose. But the letter to Collins came back marked “deceased” and Steward received no response at all from England. “The last word I got was that [Rose] had a long white beard and was ambling around London wearing a long black raincoat,” he later wrote to the publisher and activist Winston Leyland. “I…sent off four letters to four different addresses I had for him, including one in care of Cecil Beaton, but there was no response, nor did the letters come back.”
A number of unexpected letters did arrive, however, from Steward’s former students at DePaul. Some bordered on the comic, being so true to type: “I am Ralph Schuler the boxer you turned on to literature,” one began. “I once posed for a drawing you were doing in your apartment.” But the comedy quickly gave way to expressions of real gratitude; Schuler, now a high school teacher in Franklin Park with five teenage children, concluded his note of congratulation by writing, “Sam…I want to thank you very much for being a positive influence on me during those years at DePaul. To a large number of your students you were the professor Clarence Andrews you so well described in the first page of your book. In my case you taught me to think, to keep an open-mind, and above all to recognize and feel the pleasure that can be had from learning. [With] Love & Appreciation, Ralph & Donna [Schuler].” Another former student, this one female, wrote simply, “Dear Dr. Steward, I regret that you were so unhappy at DePaul, but I do not regret that you were at DePaul. You were an exceptional teacher who inspired as well as informed. I was in Mark Van Doren’s final class at Columbia. The lecture hall was very large, and so was the crowd. But the emotion was no greater than that in a classroom on Kenmore Avenue, 25 May 1956.”
One letter moved Steward to tears. Written by his former student Diego Martinez, it concluded,
Remember that last day of class when you wore a regular tie
*
for our amusement? We laughed and applauded. And when you told us that you were quite aware of our likening you (in looks) to Clifton Webb?…long-ago days: 1950–51 and 1951–52 at DePaul. My freshman and sophomore years. How I hated that place! Staff and students were provincial. All, except for Dr. Steward…You were my first experience with a truly great and inspiring mind. So many of us felt that way. In fact, we became a cult and you our figure. This, of course, was fortified by your Arts Club. Remember that! I had just discovered ballet and was open for more. Your classes had led me to literature. Your club led me to art, opera, the symphony.
…Those were special days, Dr. Steward. You had the greatness that all teachers should have…Still, you were not a snob. You told us this, arguing how you couldn’t be both a snob and a teacher. Also, you referred to yourself as a dilettante. I thought you were the last word!
Time passed. I heard you were tattooing on South State Street. Scandalous? No. Intriguing? Yes. But how was it possible that you could have left teaching with the announcement to your students that you had nothing more to say to them (the story I heard). Impossible, I thought. Still…
I remembered your [teaching for] your logic in presentation, your awareness of whether or not you were holding interest, your manner that brought respect and yet imparted humor and humaneness. I capitalized on all these things as a [high school English] teacher, adapting them, of course, to the level of juniors and seniors in a Chicago public high school. It worked. I loved it—for six years. Then came 1968 and the revolution was in full flame…At this point, I remembered you again. I understood too well what it meant to feel you no longer had anything to say to your students. They now had all the answers, and I had nothing but questions.
If you have read these ramblings this far, Dr. Steward, you can give up trying to remember me among those thousands of “ugly pimpled face(s).” It’s been too long. I was too quiet. My name in those days was different (it was Diego). But I had to write this. I remember talking with a group of students before one of your classes. We were remarking on how great we thought you were when one girl asked, “do you think he knows? Do you?”
Dear Sammy: I had to make sure that you knew.
Steward responded,
Dear Diego,
Your letter shattered me, really—left me awash in great puddles of sentimentality and appreciation, and was disturbing in a very curious way. If I had known that there were so many—as you indicate—feeling the way you did I might not ever have left teaching. And what a horror that would be! Grown old and crotchety, and telling the same jokes over and over, with everyone passing on to the next generation all the quiz questions.
Yes, long-ago days…I can almost come up with your face in my memory (whether you were silent or not), but the outlines are a bit fuzzy, for standing between you and me are twenty-five years, the deaths of thousands of my brain cells, and the hundred and fifty thousand customers from the tattoo shop. I wish I had a small snapshot of you…as for what I look like at this remove, you may see the ravaged landscape spread over the pages of the
Advocate
; a little boy is coming tomorrow to snap his lens at me…
I went on with the tattoo shop out here in California until 1970, when—mugged and strong-armed thrice—I decided that it was time to quit. So then I began to write, under the name of Phil Andros—and there are seven or eight cheap novels floating around, paperbacks all, pornies. This may come out in the
Advocate
interview, so you’ll know it anyway. That was fun, for a while.
…Do let me hear from you again. It was a joy, a very real pleasure.
So began the most significant and sustaining friendship of Steward’s final decades. Steward’s former pupil Diego Martinez, now known as Douglas Martin, conducted a warm and loving correspondence with Steward that quickly became the single greatest consolation to him in his otherwise very lonely old age.
•
Dear Sammy
appeared in July 1977 to good reviews, with the exception of a slighting write-up by the
New York Times Book Review
critic James Atlas, who found Steward’s “slavish devotion” to the two great literary women unseemly. The memoir did have its odd moments; to anyone unaware of Steward’s fascination with Stein and Toklas, and also unaware of Steward’s own lifelong obsession with record-keeping, his re-creation of their conversations may well have seemed like borderline fabrications. Steward’s many explanatory footnotes, meanwhile, seemed quietly to insist upon his own significance to the Stein-Toklas story, which (as Steward was first to admit) had been minimal. The book was nonetheless a valuable contribution to Stein scholarship, for Steward had a great deal of unique and otherwise unknown biographical information to share, most particularly Stein’s discussion with him about her lesbianism. Previous biographies had pussyfooted around this most obvious of topics, since open discussion of homosexuality was then relatively rare in literary biography, even in the mid-1970s. As late as 1970, Francis Steegmuller in his prizewinning biography
Cocteau
had addressed his subject’s homosexuality with both hostility and contempt.
Publication of the memoir caused Steward unexpected trouble with his old friend James Purdy, who was deeply angered by Steward’s inclusion of Toklas’s letters featuring derogatory remarks about his fiction. “He blames me for their content!” Steward wrote Douglas Martin. In truth, Steward had attempted to shield Purdy from Toklas’s slighting references to him by omitting them from his “Purdy” index entry—for Steward had, with a scholar’s thoroughness, written his own index. He had also teasingly placed several phony citations into the same index entry, knowing that Purdy would almost certainly prefer to look himself up in the index rather than read the book from start to finish. Several of the pages Steward cited in the index entry bore no mention of Purdy at all; one was for page 260, even though the book had only 148 pages.
Steward played other pranks as well. He had Houghton Mifflin send a review galley to Phil Andros in care of his old friend Jim Kane. And after James Atlas’s review appeared in
The New York Times
, Steward published a letter of complaint to the paper, signing it Philip M. Andros. He also telephoned James Atlas at home and, when Atlas picked up, blasted an air horn into the receiver.
While essentially reconciled to the revelation of his Phil Sparrow identity, Steward was much more concerned about what might happen to
Dear Sammy
if his pornographic work as Phil Andros came to light.
*
He consequently suggested to his friend Richard Hall,
*
the literary editor of
The Advocate
, that “this may not be exactly the time to pull all the plugs.” While Hall acquiesced to Steward’s request for discretion until after the memoir’s publication, he nonetheless suggested that Steward then consider writing about his friendship with Thornton Wilder, for Steward had recently referred to their intimacy in an
Advocate
interview. But Steward disliked the idea of being so sexually indiscreet:
Jonathan [Ned] Katz
*
was after me to write down the Thornton [reminiscences]…But alas, I am still wrestling with an old ethic (or conscience or something)…which made me sort of regret my remarks [about him] in the
Advocate
interview, for I think Isabel Wilder is still alive and would be wounded…So all this is just saying, rather tentatively, that I still don’t know whether I should.
Steward shared similar concerns with Douglas Martin, observing that “the complexities and nuances of such a subject are worrisome and vexing, and I think I’ll end by not doing the article at all.” By early December, Hall was pressing him instead to write a piece about his visit with Lord Alfred Douglas, who had no surviving family members who might have been hurt by such revelations. But Steward, still wary of engaging in what he described to Martin as “biograffiti,” again declined.
*
•
Shortly thereafter, Steward hinted in a letter to Douglas Martin that he was approaching his five thousandth documented sexual encounter. Martin immediately wrote back in amazement that he, too, had engaged in detailed sexual record-keeping for most of his adult life: “I’ve kept journals of my last 914 tricks,” he confessed. “Beats me why I ever started…Methinks it has to do with the lengths my scholarly professors made me go.”
“With 914 [men] you’re ahead of me,” Steward responded. “I’ve got only 801—but the total of contacts with those is near 5,000. Shall we draw straws to see who’s a bigger whore? Kinsey looked at my totals, stroked his chin and said: ‘Well, that’s not bad…but I’ve seen better.’” When Martin complimented him by return mail on his breadth of sexual experience, Steward felt he needed to put his own statistics into clearer perspective, and wrote back,
I fear you vastly overrate my prowess. I said I was “approaching” 5000, which meant actually 4,541—but I began that count with my very first experience in high school, and if you divide that number by the years of my life you get something like once every four days…which, you will admit, is not as grandiose a figure as you computed, and certainly not worth a bronzing…[Along with my Stud File] I have a glass jar full of [collected] pubic hair[s]…and…a small reliquary of the pubic hair of Rodolfo Guglielmi, whom you might know by another name. It was my first “clipping.”
Martin immediately responded, “Pubic Hairs? Oh, my God, you too! Only I don’t use a glass jar. [I] tape them to corresponding entries.”
Over the course of the next few months, Steward and Martin cackled over the many other bizarre coincidences in their lives, communicating frequently by phone as well as by letter. Quite apart from being, like Steward, a schoolteacher, an art and dance aficionado, a sexual record keeper, and a bibliophile, Martin turned out to be a former patron of the J. Brian Modeling Agency, having hired hustlers from Brian at exactly the same time that Steward had been collaborating with Brian on
First Time Round
and
Four: More Than Money
. “Incidentally,” Martin noted in his next letter, “did you ever meet that long-legged, hung hunk…who played Andros in J. Brian’s film of
$TUD
? Well, I did.” To which Steward replied, “Since you bedded him, and I did too, I guess we’re linked together too, hey?”
•
A few days later, while waiting for a bus in downtown Berkeley, Steward was approached by three black youths who demanded his money. Steward refused to give it to them. The three men then attacked and beat him. After knocking him to the ground, they stole Steward’s wallet and wristwatch, smashed his glasses, and kicked him until he was bloodied and unconscious. After they left, a bystander came to Steward’s aid, and an ambulance came and took him to the hospital.
The experience so traumatized Steward that in the weeks and months that followed he rarely left the house except to walk his dog. His injuries from the attack, meanwhile, were so serious that they eventually required him to have hip-replacement surgery. Nonetheless, in the week that followed the beating Steward made light of his injuries to Douglas Martin, writing, “I spent the rest of the day at a hospital, getting stitched up. Me ethereal beauty is marred, and I am confined to house. They wanted money and I said ‘fuck off’ which was evidently a wrong trigger. Well, I’ll recover—and watch my language from now on.” When several months later Martin noted in passing how many of the stories in
$TUD
had featured black men, Steward responded, “I was an old liberal when I left Chgo, but life among the blacks [of Oakland] has changed all that. So
$TUD
has black stories in’t, but check all the rest of the sacred canon…blacks [are] never mentioned, all replaced by fuzz. Thus doth the world wag.”