CHAPTER TWO -- A FAMOUS ARTIST SETS MY STORY IN MOTION
(Did You Sleep With the Models?)
Months before, as Helen Frankenthaler walked into the room and came toward me with hand extended, I couldn't have guessed that she was about to alter the trajectory of my life. Dark haired and in her mid-fifties, with piercing but convivial eyes, she looked, in person, like the almost-glamorous stand-in for a famous actress, perhaps Anne Bancroft. It was only when she spoke that one felt the force of her personality, of her talent. Helen Frankenthaler was one of the most famous and important American artists of the mid-twentieth century.
How did she, a stranger, bring about this remarkable volte-face in my destiny? Neither of us could have imagined, as we shook hands and she began to speak, that today she would inadvertently turn me in the direction of future editor-in-chief of three gay magazines: Mandate, Honcho, and Playguy.
"You come highly recommended," she announced in a voice that was both breezy and full of intent. "You made an impression at the Museum." Her accent combined East Side Manhattan, where she grew up, with inflections of New England private schools attended by the daughters of wealthy families.
The Museum was the Museum of Modern Art, often shortened to MoMA. A few days earlier, in that June of 1981, I went for an interview with the curator of the Drawings and Prints Department. She needed an assistant with office skills and some knowledge of the art world. Her name isn't important. Her peculiarities, and an inadequate salary, are what made me reject her offer.
I suppose I did well in interviews, though I never quite convinced myself of it. A few years earlier I was offered a job at HBO, which was still in its infancy. Why did I turn that down? I had no idea what cable television was all about. I also had no interest in finding out, nor in working for a corporation. Then, too, I rebelled at the thought of wearing suit and tie and becoming, to whatever extent, a company man.
Back to the MoMA story. During my interview there, the curator said that in theory jeans were all right for office wear. I asked, because I owned virtually no other kind of trousers. Her little dog, however, who accompanied her to work each day, didn't like denim. The dog might be upset, and bark. Or growl. Or bite. When she phoned next day to offer me the job, I thanked her but said that unfortunately the pay was too low. This was true. I recall the figure: $13,500 a year. In 1981, that was almost a living wage, even in New York. Just barely. The prestige of working at MoMA was expected to compensate for living on the poverty line.
I'm sure she found an assistant who dressed to please the bitch -- I refer, of course, to the canine.
Frankenthaler knew everyone at MoMA. Someone in Personnel -- as such departments were called before the Orwellian name change to Human Resources -- suggested that she give me a call to ask whether I might like to work as her assistant. Her factotum. My phone rang one morning.
"Hello."
"This is Helen Frankenthaler. Am I speaking to Mr. Staggs?"
"The Helen Frankenthaler?" I asked. She must have thought me naive, and terribly young. Actually, I was neither. Well, not a teenager. I might have reacted with equal surprise if the caller had been Jacqueline Onassis. Not that I was a celebrity chaser. Quite the opposite. Then and now, there's a famous face on every New York corner, so that one becomes jaded. The star who would have dazzled me was Greta Garbo. I did nod and smile to Lillian Gish once on a crosstown bus, but sat unflinching and calm between Celeste Holm and Lily Tomlin at an off-Broadway play. At intermission, Lily said "Hi," I returned her greeting, and today I wonder how I could have been so blasé. I might have had a pleasant conversation with this incomparable comedienne. Celebrity chasing, however, was not the done thing in New York. Perhaps this unwritten rule was formulated by the thousands who escaped small towns to avoid unwelcome neighborly chit chat.
At the interview, Frankenthaler outlined the duties of her assistant. At first, I was enthusiastic. Then she came to the one about driving. With her as passenger, and accompanied by occasional friends, the assistant would motor on weekends from Manhattan to her second home in Darien, Connecticut. And back again on Monday morning. Although I learned to drive at fourteen, I had never owned a car. I lived in places where public transportation was the convenient mode of travel. As she described these out-of-town trips, a horrific headline flashed across my mind: Helen Frankenthaler and Assistant in Turnpike Smash-up. I realized that she and I were not a match made in heaven. Nor at MoMA, and certainly not on Interstate 95.
Another job offer bites the dust.
It may appear that no employment was to my liking, but that is not correct. Arriving in New York in 1974, I took an office job at Columbia University and remained there until 1979. Then, for a brief span I ran a book club for the United Methodist Church. My colleagues there were kind and warm-hearted. They employed people of all religions, and of none. The Methodists are unlike many other denominations, whose meanness is well documented in all its vileness.
Next, I jumped back into teaching, and jumped back out ere long. My first job out of college was teaching French at the university level, first as a graduate teaching assistant, then as full-time faculty. That was in the South. A few years later, lacking a Ph.D., I had no hope of a college or university teaching position in degree-glutted New York. With an M.A. in French, however, and further graduate study in comparative literature, I was ripe for the plucking by a private secondary school.
"Boys and girls, meet Mr. Staggs of the English Department."
Remember the Squeers School in Nicholas Nickelby? Or perhaps you recall Mr. Creakle, cold-blooded headmaster of Salem House, David Copperfield's first boarding school. The Rhodes School that I knew was not yet a Dickensian institution, although it was en route.
The Rhodes Preparatory School, when it was on West Fifty-fourth Street, had been an excellent private establishment with a roster of well-known alumni, including the actors Robert De Niro and James Caan; Ron Brown, U.S. Secretary of Commerce under President Bill Clinton; and Jane Stern, who, with her husband Michael Stern, are co-authors of books on food, travel, and pop culture, including The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste and the Roadfood series.
For many years the school was owned and operated by members of the Merrall family. In early 1980, the scion of that family sold the school -- name, records, reputation -- to Donald Nickerson and his wife, Margaret, known as Peg. The Nickersons relocated it to West Eighty-third Street, at a time when the Upper West Side was only borderline chic.
At the interview, the Nickersons seemed anodyne. Only later did I realize their craftiness in failing to reveal an important fact: I was hired to replace a teacher who had gone AWOL at Christmas. My short stay of two terms gave them time to groom a crony from their earlier school-owning years. Came the month of June: exit Staggs of the English Department.
Believing, when I arrived at the school in January 1981, that I was permanent, I learned only at the end of spring term that I had been hired, in effect, as a temp. I shed no tears on departure, for the school was poorly run. Faculty morale had nosedived. The Nickersons crept around corners, frowned a great deal, and seemed to consider lengthy memos the key to efficient administration. Discipline of students did not thrive. The fear was that parents would withdraw their offspring in favor of institutions that mollycoddled. That would never do; fewer pupils, leaner coffers. Therefore, every teacher for himself and let the devil take the hindmost.
One of my pupils was Tony Ray, the son of actress Gloria Grahame. A quiet boy, well behaved, he might have been the product of Main Street rather than a child of Hollywood. Not until a year or so later, when I had left the school and he had graduated, did I make the connection: his mother was an unforgettable screen presence, a minor Hollywood legend. She died a few months after I left the Rhodes School. When I ran into Tony the following year I expressed my sympathy and we had a cordial chat.
Before the end of the 1980s, the school floundered, attendance dropped, the Nickersons bailed, and in 1988 they landed at the Gregory School in Arizona. Donald Nickerson's obituary, in 2015, omitted the Rhodes School from his pedagogical achievements.
That summer of 1981 turned into the happiest one of my life to that point. As I breezed around the city, I imagined dashing off a thank-you note to the Nickersons for making me redundant. My only obligation was a weekly trip to the unemployment office, where I was quizzed about job-hunting efforts and sent to a few unproductive interviews. Apart from that, I stayed out late at the bars, cruised Central Park and Riverside Park, slept in, read dozens of books, worked out and swam, bought cheap tickets for plays off- and off-off-Broadway, including one or two by the brilliant Charles Ludlam at the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. I walked all over Manhattan, developing an intimacy with the city that is possible only on foot. To quote Wordsworth, "Bliss it was to be alive, but to be young was very heaven."
If you've read this far, you are perhaps waiting for a money shot. When I mention bars, I refer to those I frequented. Dozens of others existed throughout the city's five boroughs, so many that even a full-time barfly couldn't take them all in. Boot Hill, on Amsterdam Avenue, was an easy walk from my apartment. Despite its Wild West name, it was a friendly, t-shirt and jeans kind of place, though no one was turned away for wearing jacket and tie or even, on occasion, a post-opera tuxedo. On the other hand, rigid dress codes were enforced at places like the Mineshaft, that wicked bar of legendary ill repute. There, posted on the door, was a sign:
"Approved dress includes the following: cycle, leather & western gear, levis, jocks, action ready wear, uniforms, t-shirts, plaid shirts, just plain shirts...NO COLOGNES or PERFUMES/NO SUITS, TIES, DRESS PANTS/NO RUGBY SHIRTS, DESIGNER SWEATERS, OR TUXEDOS/NO DISCO DRAG OR DRESSES." The list sounds tongue-in-cheek, but enforcement was strict.
A friend recently recalled his failed attempt to breach the Macho Curtain: "I was to meet a boyfriend there, an exchange student from Denmark. I turned up in white linen pants with a collarless Gianfranco Ferré mustard-plaid linen shirt, a white tennis sweater with navy tipping, and cloud-white canvas deck shoes.
"The leather-clad doorman held me back. I pleaded: 'My friend is in there, he's a foreigner. He'll think I ditched him.' "
" ' Listen, Baby Doll,' " said the doorman, ' I can guarantee your friend is not thinking about you. If I let you in, there won't be anything left of you in an hour. Now go to the West Village, grab an iced coffee, and forget about coming in here.' "
From the mid-Seventies into the early Eighties, the clone look was de rigueur for gay men who wished to counter the tired old stereotype of gays as swish and effeminate. Clones -- and I was one -- wore t-shirts and well-washed jeans, often button-fly 501 Levis with bottom grommet left unhooked. This produced a phallic tension in the fabric that zoomed every hungry eye to the crotch. I knew a man who spent hours sliding an emery board over the denim of this nether zone to produce a subtle spotlight effect. Result: No eye left unfilled. His macro endowment also helped, of course.
Long 1970s hippie hair was passé. Now it was worn relatively short, not fussed over and never sprayed. Buzz cuts, shaved heads, dyed hair in pastel colors were looked on as punk and uncool outside of certain quarters such as the East Village.
The face was typically clean-shaven except for a moustache -- trimmed or full -- and a gym physique completed the butch look. This style varied from one part of New York to another, and from coast to coast. In San Francisco, for instance, Castro Clones might choose chinos and Lacoste polo shirt or tank top.
Here I quote from a Mandate article by Charles Jurrist, who is looking back, in December 1984, to a style that already had largely faded. Describing the "rigorous clone orthodoxy in matters of dress," he catalogues the "two basic choices of footgear: boots (construction, motorcycle, or cowboy) or track shoes. On your legs you could wear denim or leather. Or both. Chaps were sexy on the right kind of legs. Torso options were denim (again), leather (again), plaid flannel, hooded sweatshirt, bomber jacket." This description reflects the West Village, where Charles lived, more than my own Upper West Side haunts.
Leather jacket or vest was optional, as was a bandana in various colors to signal sexual preference. This hanky code was elaborate. Black for S&M, dark blue=anal, turquoise=head, etc. Depending on whether the handkerchief was worn in left or right back pocket, the signal could mean sexual top or bottom. Eventually the do's and don'ts came to resemble court etiquette at Versailles in the reign of Louis XIV.
The Mineshaft, the Anvil, and several other venues functioned as sex clubs rather than traditional gay bars, the difference being that in the latter patrons drank, talked, snacked, and in some you could dance or visit the back room for a fast encounter. In a piano bar -- mostly chi chi East Side spots -- you could sing along. Women and drag queens turned up at many of the neighborhood bars, especially in the Village. By dramatic contrast, at the Mineshaft, the Anvil, and after-hours bars, you could check your clothes at the door. Or, depending on your comfort level, retain your underwear, your jockstrap, your shoes (always a good idea given the spectre of athlete's foot), or any fetish item that might prove handy.
Now, my next story is slightly risqué.
In places like the Mineshaft, water sports didn't mean the same as for Esther Williams. And so, imagine my surprise one Sunday afternoon when I peeked into a side room and saw, kneeling in a slightly tarnished bathtub, a boy I had known since second grade but hadn't seen for years. What do you say at such a reunion? "Rather a wet afternoon, isn't it?" (But the sun shone bright over New York City.) "I'll come back after you've dried off." (That might not be for hours.) Suspecting he might be a Lana Turner fan, I considered a title from her filmography: Keep Your Powder Dry. Or perhaps more a propos: The Rains of Ranchipur.
Recalling some favorite 1980s hot spots -- the Eagle, Rawhide, Badlands, the Candle -- I am engulfed in fumes of nostalgia, spiked no doubt by lingering testosterone. To counter that emotion, I summon up less winsome memories of thick cigarette smoke, poppers to rival radiation at Chernobyl, the drunks, the competition for a desirable trick or for any trick at all as last call resounded shortly before 2:00 a.m. closing.
John Devere, founding editor of Mandate, liked to say that you would see more gays at the opera than in any gay bar. And he was right. The same for Broadway, concerts, museums. New York was a gay city, despite the displeasure of such reactionary forces as the New York Times, the city's other newspapers, and politicians like Ed Koch, the closeted mayor from 1978 to 1989. (Koch's closet was transparent, like his unfortunate beard, Bess Myerson, a former Miss America who was later indicted on charges of conspiracy, mail fraud, and obstruction of justice. Later still, she was arrested for shoplifting.)
As for the Times, it is always late to the party no matter how much it tries to be hip. Not until 1987 did it end its ban on the word "gay." From July 15 of that year, the paper's prissy policy allowed the editorial staff to use the word, but only as an adjective, not as a noun. In recent years, the paper's ingratiating attempts at gay-friendliness seem as quaint as love beads or bell bottom trousers. It will reek forever of establishment condescension. Hypocrisy at the Times is constant and well documented. Despite its evolution to thundering political correctness, the paper's upper management faced accusations of blatant racism in 2021 from 150 members of its own staff.
Wordsworth was right: Bliss it was. Too impatient for the bars? You would almost certainly score at the baths...or the Ramble in Central Park...Riverside Park from the West Seventies to Eighty-Sixth Street...the piers at the end of Christopher Street. Still horny? Pick up the latest copy of The Advocate, turn to the pink personals section, and dial a number. Easier still just to look around you, for street cruising went on nonstop. Among the many curses of twenty-first century cell phone addiction is that no one looks up to see who's available a few feet away. Grindr and Squirt are poor alternatives, despite the paeans of aficionados. Those photos on your smart phone may be a decade out of date. The six-pack abs may have shrunk to single malt. Online hookups mean often having to say, "I'm sorry."
Sex in those days seemed on offer everywhere, but most New York gay men had a full non-erotic schedule: work, and the routines of daily life. A New York day unrolled more or less as in Atlanta, Minneapolis, or San Diego. Only the wealthy or the chronically unemployed could pursue a sybarite's existence. I was neither. With youthful nonchalance, I trusted the future to bring me a job. Meanwhile, every week a modest unemployment check arrived.
Present-day New York youth will find it beyond belief that one could live fairly well on a modest income. My rent, in a one-bedroom apartment at 270 West Ninety-first Street near West End Avenue, was $250 a month. With spare time, and limited funds, I taught myself to cook.
In the early 1980s, when I began editing the magazines, Ronald Reagan had been in the White House less than a year, and so his heinous policies had not yet infected the land. In New York, we felt immune to such yahoos as Reagan, his mean, tacky wife, and the blackguards of their administration. I say "their" because Nancy functioned as co-president who ran the country by horoscope and ill will. (Johnny Carson said that her religion was Christian Dior.)
It seems as far in the past as 1881.
At this point I insert a lovely quote from The Swimming-Pool Library, a novel by Alan Hollinghurst. He was writing about London in the early eighties, but it applies equally well to my warm, sunny, beautiful urban months of 1981 in New York: "My life was in a strange way that summer, the last summer of its kind there was ever to be. I was riding high on sex and self-esteem -- my belle époque -- but all the while with a faint flicker of calamity, like flames around a photograph, something seen out of the corner of the eye."
Without the belle époque of gay New York in the seventies and eighties, there would have been no Mandate, Honcho, or Playguy. Gay art, as it were, imitated gay life. The faint flicker that summer appeared on July 3, 1981, in the New York Times: "Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals." That news story marked the official beginning of the great catastrophe.
Years later, it occurred to me how strangely ironic it was that I might have gone to work for Helen Frankenthaler. Had I known, back then, of her conservative Republican leanings, I might not have trekked to her townhouse on East Ninety-fourth Street, even to see the stunning Frankenthalers that hung on every wall. She was pals with such neoconservatives as Irving Kristol, his wife Gertrude Himmelfarb, the despicable Dick Cheney, later vice-president under George W. Bush, and Cheney's firebrand wife, Lynne, who served as chair of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1986 to 1993. It was during her tenure that Robert Mapplethorpe lost his grant from the NEA. Helen Frankenthaler was among the anti-Mapplethorpe mob that cheered on Lynne Cheney, Jesse Helms, and their infamous cohorts.
Frankenthaler's work deserves the acclaim it has garnered for decades. Her failures are surely moral, not artistic. Did she ever stop to think what many in that howling mob would have said about her own nonrepresentational art before she was established, and unassailable? Imagine the insults they might have flung at her as a woman, a Jew, an avant-gardist: "My five-year-old could do better than that...I could paint that myself...What is it supposed to be?...Why can't she paint horses and dogs?... She's no Norman Rockwell."
A further irony: I am probably the only editor who rejected a layout of Mapplethorpe's work as he was becoming famous. But not, of course, because it was too arousing. On the contrary; not arousing enough. But more on that later.
Great storytelling, Sam! I believe you asked for people to mention typos to you? If so, there is one in the section where you talk about attire at the bars: it should be “choose”, not “chose”. Otherwise, this is very enjoyable. Thank you!
Hi Sam. Found your sub stack searching for other memoirists on the platform here. I must say, you have a great story to tell! I grew up in San Francisco and while not a member of the gay society, it was all around me as a young person, very much part of the broader culture of the city, and I appreciated it as an outside observer. I would ride my skateboard through the Castro on the way home from high school to catcalls from the second-floor balconies. Thanks boys! Anyhow -- well done for putting this out there. This piece was fun to read... and, I was kind of left hanging, wondering when you would let the shoe drop about how you were hired on at the magazines. I suppose that's left to a future chapter?
Cheers