Love in the Loire Read online

  When Estelle mourned that she didn’t get to see men’s bodies anymore Kitty said, “I don’t mean that. Although it would be nice.”

  “It’s true. Men did look different in our day.” Estelle nodded at Kitty.

  “Our day, my dear?” Kitty said. “I could be your mother. How old are you?”

  Estelle said, “Seventy. Now that I’m seventy I admit it. I wouldn’t discuss my age for years.”

  “Seventy’s nothing. I’m ninety-four. And you know the sex stuff never goes away. Isn’t that depressing news, my darling?” She reached over and patted my knee. She was quite extraordinary. Tall, slim, lovely legs, great charisma. There was no feeling of being with an older person. As was true of Estelle, also.

  “It encourages one to keep in fighting trim,” I said.

  Kitty said, “I remember during the war all the young men who came through New York, wonderful in their uniforms, seemed to be so slim, slim, slim with broad shoulders and narrow waists. Not so tall as nowadays perhaps, but there was something there. They had profiles, too. And men used to cross their legs and smoke, like so.” She mimed it for us, one knee over the other knee.

  “Now men seem to think it is effeminate to cross their legs like that. They will put one ankle on their knee . . .” she showed us, “. . . generally they don’t even do that. They like to sit with their legs apart like this. Like footballers on a bench waiting to play.” She demonstrated this pose, too. People at the next table were watching with great interest.

  “‘Put me in, Coach, I’m hot.’ Do you remember that expression?” Estelle asked.

  “I’m afraid I never heard it,” Kitty said.

  “I’ve never heard it, but I’m going to start using it,” I said.

  “And then they fell apart,” Estelle said. “There weren’t gyms. Men wouldn’t have gone to a gym anyway. Can you imagine William Powell going to a gym? With that moustache. I wanted to be Myrna Loy when I grew up. So sophisticated. The Thin Man and all that.”

  “She was a lovely woman,” Kitty said. “Started out as a chorus girl. They used to get her up like an Oriental girl. They thought she looked Chinese. She certainly showed them. And what was that when William Powell planned to marry Jean Harlow just before she died? I wouldn’t have thought she was at all his type. She really was only playing herself, you know. She was heading toward getting fat. A blonde.”

  Estelle said, “Hold it. I was a blonde.”

  “Yes, but not that type, I’m sure. You’re the Lauren Bacall type. You must be something of the same age.”

  “Betty claims to be younger than I am, but she’s not. Now she says she did her first movie when she was twenty or something like that. Get real.”

  “You have a much younger vocabulary than I do, Estelle. It suits you,” Kitty said.

  “So how are men now,” I said, “if they’re not as slim and dashing and well-tailored?”

  “Now they seem to be boys. Back then, the boys all looked like men. Now the men all look like boys. You seem to be a boy, Hugo. You must be the same age as Lawrence Olivier was when he did Wuthering Heights,” Kitty said.

  “Don’t depress me,” I said. “I feel I’m lucky to be doing The Red Mill under your eagle eye.”

  “You are probably going to go far. But you’ll have to figure out the gay thing,” Kitty said.

  “That’s what I told him,” Estelle said. “It’s a theater thing. Everyone wants to fall in love with the leading man. They don’t want to know that it’s out of the question.”

  I said, “I certainly am not going to run that tired old line about being entitled to your privacy up the flagpole. Every man who does that might just as well have ‘fag’ stamped on his forehead.”

  “My husband was interested in men, too,” Kitty said. “It’s a phenomenon. I really can’t imagine saying to someone, ‘Please don’t have exciting sexual experiences that have nothing to do with me just because I don’t want you to.’ Who has the right to do that? That’s like saying, ‘I don’t want you to play tennis because I don’t.’”

  Estelle and I took a few moments to digest this. Kitty broke the silence. “Who were you married to, my dear?” she asked Estelle.

  “I was never married to him, but I spent thirty years of my life trailing around after Punto Carretas. You may have heard of him. He sang with Xavier Cugat at one time. He played the guitar,” Estelle said.

  “Did you love him?” Kitty asked.

  “He was a man. And I always like that in a person,” Estelle said. “I wouldn’t say I love him anymore. He’s not dead. He’s in Philadelphia.”

  “Practically the same thing,” Kitty said.

  “You’re telling me,” Estelle said. “Didn’t W. C. Fields say, ‘I was in Philadelphia last weekend, but it was closed.’” They both laughed heartily. I’ve never been in Philadelphia.

  “To get back to sex,” Estelle said, “Punto played around a lot but never with the boys. At one point I just decided what he does when he’s not around me I’m just going to ignore as long as he gives me the attention I want when he’s with me. I had to admit to myself I was satisfied with that. I was very busy. I was working a lot. I was out of town on tours or in rehearsals. If I said I missed him I would have been lying. I didn’t fool around myself because when I’m attached to someone I just don’t have those feelings. I kind of saw it as my not having the right to say he shouldn’t fool around or he’d lose me. Because I knew he couldn’t be any other way. And I’d lose him. And in truth my private life was fine. I had just one rule. Don’t tell me about it. We’re all adults here.”

  They both turned to look at me. Kitty said, “So you see what lies ahead?”

  “Yes,” Estelle said, “you make the rules and they’ll turn around and bite you in the ass. Usually the man you want is completely different from the man you have. You have to work with what you’ve got. And if you’re busy, it’s usually plenty.”

  “Well, gals, you’ve given me a lot to think about,” I said. Our Fantas and Diet Cokes were drained. The little addition was on the edge of the table. I put some money on top of it.

  “We haven’t even talked about being a gay man and having an acting career,” Estelle said.

  “I feel I’m something like you, Estelle,” I said. “The love thing seems to me to be more fulfilling than the acting thing. I think I’d miss it a lot if I don’t really ever have it. The acting thing, I’m not so sure I’m going to go to bed sobbing in later years if it doesn’t happen.”

  Kitty said, “It’s because you are so good-looking. I’m sure you feel you have some responsibility to share it with the world. It’s part of your talent. But you’re sharing it with the world just by being alive. And you don’t owe anything to the world. You’re here to live. And if Steve is it, go for it. Oh, look, I’m beginning to talk like Estelle! Anyway, I once fell in love with someone because they were in love with me, so you can always hope for that with Steve.”

  “How lucky I am to know both of you,” I said and took their hands and kissed them, one to the left, one to the right.

  “How French,” Kitty said.

  The Graf Spee

  “I’ve always been fascinated with the Graf Spee,” Toca said. We were sitting at a table in the little square between the café and the Abbey. I was just beginning to wonder if I was a hopelessly untalented teacher or if I had a hopelessly untalented group of students. “No, no, darling,” Toca had just said, “you want them to feel something and they’re too young to feel something. You’ve forgotten what you were like at that age. They are all concerned with their clothes, are they wearing the right thing, is their hair all right, are they popular? That’s the sort of stuff that those ages are involved in.”

  I had said, “I always was in love with someone, even if I was only ten or twelve or fourteen. I felt things.”

  And Toca replied, “You were unusual. And you were probably unusually beautiful and all the older boys were trying to get into your pants.” I decide
d to drop that subject right there. I’m too young to be reminiscing about the loves that were.

  “But don’t you think that all theater revolves around placing someone else’s welfare before your own. Being able to imagine another person’s existence at least?”

  “Not at all,” Toca said. “I think you’re projecting what’s going on in your own life right now.” Toca is not really stupid. Not at all. He went on. “No. I think theater is more about the Seven Deadly Sins. About what happens to people when they become unbalanced and Power or Lust or Avarice takes over their lives. Did you ever see the series of Seven Deadly Sins painted by Paul Cadmus? They’re at the Metropolitan Museum now. I knew Paul. A painter who is going to be much admired in the next century. And probably even more in the twenty-second century. Do you ever think about what the future will make of our art? We can understand Michelangelo and Poussin and David and Van Gogh whether we like them or not. They’re going to look back at Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Motherwell and say, ‘What the fuck?’ All those blotches of color and lines running about and terrible photographs painted over. My least favorite is Cy Twombly. Those wandering lines and tracks and blotches. My theory is that if it only takes a few hours to paint, it only deserves a few hours of attention. And then we can all forget it.”

  “You are so nineteenth century,” I said.

  “To get back to Paul Cadmus, he thought there was an Eighth Deadly Sin and that was Jealousy. He did a painting of it to add to his original series. And sometimes I think it all boils down to Power. Even Love. You want to control your world so it can’t get away from you.

  “And one thing that rarely appears in theater is natural tragedy. In the past, famine and flood and disease probably did much more to devastate lives than the shenanigans of other people. We are quite exempt from all that,” Toca added.

  “There was the tsunami,” I said.

  “But for most people it only existed on the television and in the papers,” Toca said. “Most people probably registered it as some kind of horror movie.”

  “Are we in the wrong profession?” I said.

  “You mean, are we in the business of entertaining people with unreality while they ignore reality?” As I said, Toca is smart.

  “A lot of business is just that. Show business. But I think a lot of it can call reality to the audience’s attention and make some sense of it for them. Point out how they have failed themselves,” Toca said.

  “I’d love to believe that,” I said.

  “That we make sense of things for them?” Toca said.

  “No. That they come away from the theater with a strong sense of failure.”

  Toca said, “That would be nice. Since they are such flops, most of them. But sometimes drama just comes sweeping into your life on such a large scale you really don’t know what to do. You don’t know how to perform that role that has been brought to you. I’ve always been fascinated with the Graf Spee.”

  And then he told me about the Graf Spee. “I don’t think I could care deeply for any man if he wasn’t of the stature of Captain Langsdorff. He was the commander of a pocket German battleship. After World War I, the Germans weren’t allowed to build large ships. Ten thousand tons was the maximum. The American and the English ships were something like thirty-five tons. Much bigger.”

  “You know your subject. Can I have another Diet Coke?”

  “Be my guest,” Toca said and waved grandly toward the waiter while pointing at my glass with the other hand.

  “It certainly brought on the submarine menace. Submarines met the tonnage requirements. And they also built speedy little ships which were very high tech for their times. The latest in radar, great artillery, very fast. They were called pocket battleships.”

  I said, “I wonder if there is a German navy now?”

  Toca said, “I don’t know. We should find out. You never meet a German sailor. From the pictures I’ve seen of the crew of the Graf Spee they were very good-looking.”

  “Curious, isn’t it? It’s almost like Swiss sailors. Of course, there’s no such thing, but Germany is a close second. It almost has no coast line,” I said.

  “Big rivers,” Toca said.

  “But so little use for a submarine,” I said.

  “So true,” he said. “But let me go on. I know the Germans were the enemy, but even so, it is a romantic story. The Graf Spee was sent to the South Atlantic under Captain Hans Langsdorff to prey upon shipping to the Allies. From South Africa and India. There was very little loss of life because they would stop a merchant ship with a shot across its bow, take the crew off, and then torpedo it. They always had a lot of prisoners aboard. You wonder if they were prepared for that, regarding food and accommodations. It’s the sort of thing you would never think of. You’re in the middle of the Atlantic, and suddenly everyone is eating half-portions of porridge.”

  “Where did they go into port?” I said.

  “They didn’t. Supply ships came out from Germany with fuel and food and things like that.”

  “Those poor sailors,” I said.

  “They had each other,” Toca said. “I’ve seen pictures of them sunbathing on the deck. They looked great. They had pecs, even then.”

  “So?” I said.

  “So, they sank some ships off the African coast. Then they went around the Cape of Good Hope and sank a ship or two in the Indian Ocean. Coming from India. Those ships carried things like wool and frozen meat. They got things to eat from those ships certainly. But then the British Navy sent ships into the South Atlantic to find them. One of the ships they sank managed to get radio signals off before they foundered and the British were able to locate the Graf Spee.”

  “You love this kind of stuff, don’t you?” I said.

  “It’s thrilling. The handsome captain. The handsome crew. The lack of killing. It’s sort of like a movie. An all-male movie. They don’t make all-male movies anymore, do they?”

  “We probably know a lot more about homosexuality these days,” I said.

  “There are those Oceans Eleven sort of films.”

  “Yes. What gives with those people like George Clooney and Marky Mark Wahlberg who live in those compounds with a gang of male friends and never have girlfriends? Does that look suspicious to you?”

  “I guess if you’re a big enough star there can be no suspicion,” Toca said.

  “Tom Cruise should stop running around with women and move in with a house full of guys. The rumors would stop immediately,” I said.

  “You are so cunning,” Toca said. “Are you getting bored with my infatuation with the Graf Spee? Is that why you keep drifting off the subject?”

  “Indeed not. I, too, am infatuated with the subject. I think I need yet another Diet Cola,” I said.

  “You’re even beginning to talk like Noel Coward,” Toca said. The waiter reappeared again carrying the drinks. He didn’t need to ask what they would be.

  “There was a battle at sea just off the Uruguayan coast. The Graf Spee was beaten about, some men were killed, but it managed to escape and make its way to the harbor of Montevideo in Uruguay. They buried seventeen sailors there and started some repairs, but the Uruguayan government would only let them remain a few days. Too few for real repairs. And there were three British battleships laying in wait in the estuary for them.

  “Uruguay was very much dominated by the British at the time. The British Embassy ruled the roost in Montevideo. The ambassador was Teddy Millington-Drake. Very charming. Very handsome in that tall, curly-headed, fair English way. Had married an heiress. I saw a bust of him once in Montevideo. Very handsome. And if he wasn’t gay he certainly missed his calling.”

  “Back to the boats,” I said.

  “Now I digress,” Toca said. “However, Argentina, just across the river, was pro-German. There was an important German Embassy in Buenos Aires, and Argentina had been doing a lot of business with the Axis. If you’ve ever been in a cemetery in Buenos Aires, you’ve seen all
those heroic neo-Nazi monuments, many stalwart homoerotic nudes.”

  “I have that to look forward to,” I said.

  “The German Embassy in Buenos Aires was several hours upstream and across the River Platte, but they had representatives in Montevideo very promptly. There were a lot of discussions about burying the sailors who had been killed in the sea battle and getting the wounded into hospitals. I don’t think the Uruguayans were either pro-British or pro-German. War was a long way away in their past. They hadn’t had any contact with it since the 1830s. They were just trying to do the humane thing.

  “The British weren’t cooperative, though. They wanted the Graf Spee out of there and at sea where it could be sunk by the waiting British ships. Then the word came from headquarters in Germany, also. Hitler wanted them to sail. For the glory of the Third Reich they were supposed to be sunk by the British right there in the estuary without a chance of escape.

  “There was a German merchant ship in the harbor and Captain Langsdorff asked them to anchor in a position where the Graf Spee cut off the view from the shore, and began to send the crew in small boats over to the merchant ship.” Toca was getting really warmed up.

  “I don’t know if he had a plan yet or not, but he started as soon as it was clear the Graf Spee was going to have to leave port without being repaired. There was something like 300 men aboard the Graf Spee. He called for tugboats from Buenos Aires, and they came alongside the merchant ship, where they were out of view, and began to take the sailors off to transport them upriver so they would be prisoners of war in Argentina. They would be far better off there.

  “The authorities in Montevideo finally began to see what was happening and sent port officials to the merchant ship to stop them disembarking the German sailors for Buenos Aires. Two of the tugs had already left and the third was taking the last of the crew of the Graf Spee. Captain Langsdorff boated over to the merchant ship and somehow charmed the port officials into letting the last of the sailors leave. Captain Langsdorff knew the crew would be treated much better by the Argentineans than if they went into camps in Uruguay, where the British ran everything.”