Evan Richardson's Blog: EVAN - Posts Tagged "faberge"

Lonely, with time on my hands and little to do, my nightly prowls led me to a small gay bar in the East Fifties under the Queensboro Bridge. Upon entering, the bar area was quite narrow, but up some stairs, a large room in the back opened up for dancing, equipped with a banquet encircling the room with tables and chairs. The place was usually crowded, but it was raining that night and the group gathered there was pleasantly manageable.

While the music played and the mostly male couples--with a smattering of mixed couples--danced, a distinguished-looking man in his fifties with a thick head of greying hair at the table next to me began a conversation. He said his name was Jesse and that he took care of prominent women, usually socially prominent. I had no idea what that meant until he explained that he was their companion, confidant, escort, and sometimes secretary. His job description sounded like a gigolo to me, but I was curious and wondered if I could get such a position. After all, things weren’t looking so good for me at Fabergé, and I could certainly have used a backup. But I could never have been as suave as Jesse, and if that’s what it took, things didn’t look so good for me there either.

Then he revealed that he was currently taking care of Tallulah Bankhead.

“Oh, sure,” I thought to myself, “I take care of Minnie Mouse.”

In bars, they tell you anything.

Suspecting that this was only a come-on, that he had mistaken my interest for something else, I turned my attention to the dancing couples.

“Come on,” I heard him say, “I’ll take you there.”

Startled, I turned around.

“Take me where?”

“To Tallulah’s apartment.”

Either he thought I was a fool to believe such a line, or it was true. And if it was true and Bankhead was still up, God knows how she would receive someone coming in on her at this hour. Still, it fascinated me. In bars you can also meet the most interesting strangers.

Tennessee Williams has a famous line in “A Streetcar Named Desire” that Tallulah gave him for Blanche Dubois to say: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” I reflected that in that respect, Tallulah and I had a lot in common.

The apartment building that Jesse took me to was in the East Fifties and close to Sutton Place, where one day I would also come for Gloria Vanderbilt. From the chartreuse green and beige lobby, up we went in the elevator and into the apartment.

Directly in front of a small marble foyer was the living room where I immediately recognized this was indeed the great lady’s apartment. An Augustus John painting of her from the ‘20’s (that is now in the Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution) hung over a fake fireplace mantel to the left of the room while on the wall across the room behind a light blue velvet couch was a small painting of John Barrymore that I later learned she’d had an affair with, as well as Gary Cooper and James Cagney, to name a few. The other works of art and objects in the room and the furniture, mostly antique, were in exquisite taste with a feminine flair, unlikely belonging to Jesse.

I wondered why Bankhead would allow him to drag someone in here in the middle of the night, endangering herself, him, and her possessions. Perhaps he had a sixth sense about whom he brought here, but it seemed an unreliable thing to do. If that’s how he took care of someone, I was glad he wasn’t taking care of me.

“Drink?” he said, going to a small bar table to the left of the living room entrance where every kind of liquor and cocktail glasses were displayed.

“Sure,” I said, having every intention of having the drink and making a beeline for the door when it was finished.

I was curious and had come here for him to prove his claim, and so it was true, but that didn’t include compromising amenities that he, undoubtedly, had in his game plan.

“Where is she?” I asked, sitting in a matching light blue velvet-covered, wingback chair next to the couch.

He spritzed some seltzer into the bourbons he had poured and sauntered over in a John Wayne way with two crystal glasses.

“She’s asleep,” he said, handing me a glass, “in the next room.”

He sat down as close to me as he could, on the couch, which was why I had taken the chair.

Putting down my glass, I said, “Where’s the bathroom?”

He explained that it was down the hall, and I left the living room while I pondered my next move. The hallway was short and accommodated a mahogany dining table with four chairs and a crystal chandelier over them, in front of a small kitchen. Across from that, next to the living room, was a closed door behind which, I assumed, Bankhead slept. The bathroom was at the end of the hall with another room next to that which, with no other choices, had to be Jesse’s. The overall apartment was moderate in size, but adequately suited Bankhead’s needs.

Coming out of the bathroom moments later, I saw down the hall a small nude figure coming out of Bankhead’s bedroom. I jumped back into the bathroom, as much out of surprise at seeing a nude person entering the hallway as just seeing anyone, and the figure jumped back into the bedroom.

We peered down the hallway at each other like two cats on a back alley fence.

“Darling, do I know you?” her unmistakable voice boomed out.

“I don’t think so,” I said, meekly.

“Oh, well, that’s all right then. Come on in,” and she motioned for me to join her as she returned to her bedroom.

Jesse had heard our exchange from the living room, and we entered her bedroom together.

With only one chair in the room filled with clothing, Bankhead, now in a dressing gown and back in bed, patted her pink satin bed comforter and said, “Sit here.”

Jesse and I sat on her bed, and she began some light-hearted conversation as if I was an old friend and not at all an intruder, but this was how she got her information. A stranger in the middle of the night, who wouldn’t want information? Certainly Jesse asked for none, but then he had another agenda

The room was small and sparsely furnished with a large antique bureau with a lamp, the one chair--a fabric-quilted one--a queen-sized bed with a bedside table and lamp next to it, a large closet that contained her clothing and gowns she had pilfered from her Broadway shows, and one large window that was heavily draped so that not a drop of light could enter.

Broadway was a late affair, and after a performance that wired her up, the party began and nobody slept until Tallulah said so, which was usually around four in the morning. Her hours of rest were from four in the morning until four in the afternoon when she would arise and begin the whole thing all over again.

Having not been on Broadway in some time, out of habit, her schedule stayed the same. I came to believe that her twelve hours of entombment were a kind of death wish: she never wanted to go to bed and she never wanted to get up.

itting on the bed seduced by Bankhead’s offhanded interrogation, I revealed that I was a make-up artist, which interested her, as I hoped it would. With my financial choices narrowing down again, and not wanting to return to Mother’s meager handouts that barely scraped me through, I used the occasion, regardless of how odd it was, to tout my wares. She was doing the same, seizing the opportunity to corral a make-up artist for less money than she would have to pay a union one. If it worked out, it could be beneficial for both of us. I was told to give my phone number to Jesse, and so he held all the cards.

When we exited the bedroom some time later, I made the decision. Hoping to strengthen my position here, I would go to bed with him. If not, he could say he lost the number or copied it down wrong, and the matter would be dropped. It was a compromise and a gamble, but I would make it.

He introduced poppers, Amyl Nitrite, into the sex that followed, and the smell like rotting decay nauseated me.

Falling on top of me when he was finished, he mumbled something like, “Was it as good for you as it was for me?”

My head throbbing from the poppers, I got out of bed and dressed.

“I’ll see you,” I said, implying that I had given him what he wanted and now I expected what I wanted.

Passing the doorman on my way out, I was sure he thought I was a male prostitute which, with Bankhead as my payment, wasn’t far from the truth. It was still raining, and I had spent all my money at the bar. With no umbrella or carfare, I turned up my coat collar and began my trudge home.

What was I becoming, doing something against my principles for a payoff?

“What principles?” I thought.

At the bar, I had been flattered by Jesse’s attention. With little self-esteem, if a man wanted me, I felt that I had value. I had been so admonished by my parents, whom I never seemed to please, that I didn’t feel I amounted to much. For those moments that a man wanted me, I felt appreciated, attractive--even loved. It was a short-lived aphrodisiac that needed constant refuelling, an endless spiral downward into a void that could never be filled.

My mother had had me late in life and nearly died giving birth--something she never let me forget that signified to her an entitlement of ownership. After two miscarriages, she was informed that she couldn’t have children and adopted my sister. For a time, I suppose, things were acceptable, but Mother’s strong determination persisted and I arrived and immediately became her adored one—a position I had not solicited and an unpleasant one to be in since it fostered jealously and resentment in my sister and father.

He had wanted to be an engineer, but his father forced him to become a lawyer like himself and take over his law practice. Then, marrying a domineering woman like my mother and taking care of his own mother after his father died made my father’s life an unhappy one, and he drank because of it. Consequently our home was never a happy one.

Mother so indoctrinated me about my father’s drinking that we had formed a pack against him, and he knew it. I especially hated him for his drinking because of how it made Mother suffer. I became for him a symbol of all he couldn’t have, a scapegoat, literally a whipping boy. Drunk and enraged with jealousy, he beat me at the least provocation when Mother was away, knowing she would never permit it if she was there.

I wrote her once when she was visiting her father in Pennsylvania: “Please, Mother, come home. I’m being hurt here.”

She didn’t come home, and she didn’t believe me anyhow.

Once he beat me so badly that I climbed into a bathtub and pulled the shower curtain across me to protect me from the blows of his fists.

With my grandmother trying to pull him off me, I screamed repeatedly, “I wish I was dead! I wish I was dead!” It was as much a ploy to get him to stop as a preference to death than a life of abuse with him. But it only made him pound harder.

Inebriated, he attacked my mother one night. I heard them fighting and she tore into my bedroom, with him in pursuit, screaming: “Help me!” and pushed me between them. Summoning my courage, I said: “Don’t you hit my mother!” and he slapped me across my face sending me reeling backward onto my bed, knocking over a lamp, and I crashed down on top of it, cutting my face badly. He then ran down the stairs to a guest bedroom to sleep it off. With my face and hands covered in blood, I loaded a twenty-two rifle I had been given as a Christmas present and positioned myself on the stairs with the barrel of the rifle pointed into the darkness where spooks of unmentionable horrors prowled. “If he comes back up the stairs,” I vowed, “I’ll kill him.”

I was only twelve.

Unwittingly, I was learning to deal with brutes, bullies, and predators that would come in handy in some of my dealings in life: If you can’t reason or negotiate with them, you must destroy them to survive.

A favorite uncle, my mother’s brother, came into my bedroom late one night when I was a youth visiting him and drunkenly husked: “You wouldn’t let me love you, would you?” oddly put in the negative as if expecting the rebuke. I looked up to see his shadowed face leering down at me in the darkness like a spectre. Then he added: “It won’t hurt much,” as if incestuous sodomy was a small pain that was quickly over and the scars that lasted a lifetime were equally small.

With my heart pounding, reminiscent of my father’s fists, I again summoned my courage and said: “Go to bed, Uncle!” There was a pause as each of us considered what next to do, and then he slithered from the room like the predator that had entered.

I had thought of this uncle as a father when my own father betrayed me. I felt doubly betrayed by my uncle because I needed that father that was denied me and he took away the last vestiges of it.

With a stern voice I had protected myself from my uncle; I played dead to ward off Tod’s advances in Paris; and I allowed Jesse his way to get what I wanted with Tallulah. Not an admirable thing to do, but when you’re dealing with predators, what is admirable?

But there was no satisfaction here. The true reason for my nightly prowls, the real reason for sharing Jesse’s bed, was not the lure of Tallulah but a constant search for a love that had been denied me, that endless spiral downward into a bottomless pit, an unquenchable thirst for which there was no panacea.

Several days after my late-night encounter with Tallulah, I was told that the creative department at Fabergé was being terminated and I was being transferred to the sales department to do whatever they wanted with me. Amelia and Barbara had both been let go, and after considering my situation without my creative buddies, I asked to be released, too, knowing that I could, at least, collect unemployment.

As I was collecting my belongings, I received a call from Jessica Canné, the Beauty Editor at Vogue.

“You’ve been telling us how you can do make-up better than our models,” she said, “so come over and do it.”

Bingo! It was the call I had been waiting for.

After an appointment with Vogue was arranged for the following week, I packed up and left Fabergé for good.

Soon after, Jesse called, too.

“The ‘Living Legend,’” as he jokingly referred to Tallulah, “wants to see you.” Then he added: “So do I.”

Fat chance, I thought to myself.

With Tallulah on my side, I didn’t have to compromise myself anymore. And with Vogue, it would be even more unlikely. I wasn’t attracted to Jesse; I didn’t know if I even liked him. I had gambled, and it had paid off. In that, he was the loser.

With two balls in my side pocket, I was on a roll and wanted to keep it that way to make up for all the time I had spent getting this far.

I was also heading down a dark road from which I might not return, and fracturing my heart in the process.