My father decided in the summer of 1941 that we would spend the winter in southern California. My mother had bad sinus trouble; another Oregon winter in Klamath Falls could not do her any good. Palm Springs was selected, a millionaire’s desert resort about a hundred miles east of Los Angeles, the city where Dad needed often to go to see his business partner, Gus. A house was found, and at the beginning of December we set out by car: my parents, my sister Charlotte, who was ten, myself—age thirteen—and our bulldog, Missy. There was no direct train service to Palm Springs from Klamath Falls, and our trip took two days.
Palm Springs was then very much a Hollywood retreat. Movie actors and well-off business people went there to get away from Los Angeles, so it had become a little hub of some sophistication. Its pretty streets were lined with pretty shops; most of these, including the smarter hotels and the big movie theater, had been built in a version of California Spanish: white plastered walls, terracotta tile roofs, with blue and white-tiled embellishments framing the doors and windows. All of this was a far cry from the somewhat slapped-together look of a town like Klamath Falls. Our roomy rented house was also in this Mediterranean-based style, and L-shaped, with a big garden of citrus trees: very sour grapefruit, oranges, and lemons. In Klamath Falls we had no garden. Now, in addition to one, we also had a Mexican gardener, whose name I once knew, who watered and cut every day.
Our new Palm Springs house stood close, in a quiet neighborhood of other houses like it, to the foot of a steep mountain covered with barrel cactuses. The mountain threw its shadow early in the winter afternoon over our house and lawns, which soon had a depressing effect on my mother. The house that backed on to ours had a swimming pool, as ours did not, but my sister Charlotte and I were never invited there. To amuse ourselves we would climb up the steep side of the mountain, wearing our stout shoes, and then kick over the cactuses, so that they rolled down the incline. When I tell this story now, in this age of careful preservation by types like me of all the things bestowed on us by open-handed Nature, there are shocked comments.
Whenever I saw him moving about through a window, I stopped to watch him, and felt desire for the first time in my life. I longed to be his friend, and to touch him.I entered the Nellie N. Coffman Junior High School, which taught only the seventh and eighth grades. Enrolling there was, for sure, a profound “culture shock,” but it had an elevating—or should I say, freeing—effect on me. After almost eight years at the Sacred Heart Academy in Klamath Falls, where my teachers had all been nuns, and still wore medieval-looking habits of black woolen cloth, topped by a hard, white shiny substance that had once been cloth, from which their veils fell. When I misbehaved and held out my hand to be smacked by a ruler, the shiny white crowns and the angry faces beneath looked like the queens on playing cards.
My new classmates at the Nellie N. Coffman school were far more worldly than those I had known at Sacred Heart. Very few were Catholic like me. They looked and dressed differently, and talked differently. There was another eighth-grader named Bob Hoover, who had a special elan, and wore the first pair of loafers I had ever seen and short-sleeved knit shirts with open collars.
Hoover was said to be a member of the vacuum cleaner family, and had what I now know as cool. The girls, unconstrained by the watchful eyes of nuns, wore bright, pretty dresses that showed off their developing figures.
We had not been in Palm Springs for very long before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Dad called us from Klamath Falls, promising he would soon come down, and told us not to worry. We were instructed over the radio to fill up our bathtubs “just in case.” We had three bathtubs and I excitedly turned on all their taps. A rich old lady from the Palmolive-Peet family, who lived up the street, fearing a Japanese invasion, briefly took refuge with us, but went back to her mansion before we had to put her in a spare bedroom. In time the coast of California was shelled by a Japanese submarine which flattened a gas station north of Los Angeles.
I had been an altar boy at the Sacred Heart church in Klamath Falls, where I was closely watched by my father from his pew at Mass. As an army officer in the previous war he had often drilled his men, and hated any sloppy genuflections or cutting of corners from the altar boys as I returned to my kneeling position at the foot of the altar. The Latin pronunciation of my responses to the priest’s prayers as he said Mass was good; somehow, on my own, I had made it good, precise, and I offered my services as an altar boy to the parish priest in Palm Springs. When he had heard my responses to his own Latin prayers, he had slightly turned his head and given me a look from the altar, then asked me after Mass if I would coach the other altar boys. These were mostly Mexican. They spoke Spanish at home, a language with a dash of Arabic, descended from Latin. I held my little classes at the altar rail, but my pupils had no ear for Latin it seemed to me. “Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam,” I would intone in my still unchanged precise voice, looking down at them as they mumbled it back.
Once at Communion, as I was holding my little plate under the upturned chins of the communicants kneeling at the altar rail, the priest and I came to the movie actor, Don Ameche. His eyes were closed and his tongue was stuck out in readiness to receive his Lord. I stared, momentarily thrilled, as I held my communion plate under the famous chin that had nuzzled his co-star, Alice Faye. The priest placed the white wafer on this famous tongue of so many songs, from so many Hollywood musicals. No divine crumbs, the very body of Jesus Christ I had been taught, fell onto my plate. I must have been hoping they would, but the movie star only bent his head in prayer and swallowed the host.
At age 13 I had made a vow to myself never to look at my penis while I was bathing or peeing, or—out of curiosity—to handle it for any reason, like holding it out to compare with others. I had no special interest then in my penis; it did its job several times a day and looked pretty much like everyone else’s who were circumcised, including my dad’s, if smaller than his. I had looked at my naked father, walking about openly whenever my sister was not around. But I knew somehow, or felt, that my further sexual exploration and submitting to temptation was a mortal sin. I had satisfied my curiosity at age seven with my best friend, Jeanne Marie, and also with Eddy, who lived across the street. For some reason my vow did not include looking at anyone else’s penis standing at a urinal next to me in a men’s room, where, without any fear of sin, I stared quite openly at the variety of shapes and colors on either side, taking almost scientific note.
After the Christmas holidays we moved out of the house at the foot of the mountain that threw its shadow over us, far out onto the plain to a house called “Whispering Sands.” This new house had a paved patio behind it surrounded by sand where one could make out wiggly tracks sometimes, said to have been made by sidewinders, a kind of small rattlesnake. I never saw one of these and mostly stayed indoors at night. Every school day I got onto my bike, and cycled along a road across the desert to my school. This road ran alongside the landing strip of a new military airfield which was naval. One day on my way home there was a crashed plane on the edge of the airfield. Its pilot had somehow pulled himself loose from his wreck and was walking dazedly about. I got off my bike and went to see if I could be helpful, thinking the pilot might ask me to go and report the crash, but he ignored me. I continued on home, but when I told people what I had seen, no one seemed interested. It was wartime I guess, and planes were crashing all the time.
At this time, when I was 13, I had two main interests. These were ancient Egypt, and the antebellum South. I had another interest, and that was antique furniture, about which I knew a lot in terms of styles. I could rattle off names like Chippendale, Hepplewhite, and Duncan Phyfe. I mostly acquired my expertise and eye from books and the movies I saw. It was the age of the big studio period films, the greatest of these being Gone With the Wind, which arrived in Klamath Falls in 1939 or 1940, and excited movie goers all over the country. My teachers, the band of nuns at Sacred Heart Academy, advised us darkly that if our parents allowed us to go and see it, we must stop up our ears during the scene at the end, when Rhett Butler uses the word “Damn.” How did the Sisters know this, I ask myself now. Who told them about Clark Gable’s profanity? My father used the word “damn” all the time. So did my mother. Sometimes they said “God-damned” if they were especially angry.
Gone With the Wind’s influence lingered with me the next couple of years and during our trip to a family reunion in Texas in 1940, and then until we moved to Palm Springs. I made a miniature plantation house I called “Mimosa,” and placed it on a card table in our living room in Whispering Sands, and filled it up with tiny Victorian sofas and chairs I had made out of paper, like the full-sized ones I saw in Natchez when we passed through on our southern trip.
I read as many of the novels I could find that had been set in the South before the Civil War, now called “The War Between the States” down there. These often had scenes not intended for 13-year-olds, but they had little effect on me. To arouse me, the plantation house needed to be set on fire, and faithful Black retainers had to carry out the piano after hiding the family silver in a tree. My parents never investigated the contents of these novels of the romantic old South. Their authors were not of any interest to my parents.
Later versions of the tempestuous Scarlett O’Hara and the sexually charged, cigar-smoking Rhett Butler, had not been condemned by the Legion of Decency, which you had to hold up your hand in church and swear to obey. Gone With the Wind had many re-releases and I saw it again and again right up to my college years. Now it is almost never shown commercially in the United States and has something of the reputation of The Birth of a Nation. Critics and film historians have called both films racist. They have written that the performances by the Black characters in Gone With the Wind are tinged by an antique and discredited Southern sensibility: that of the story’s author, Margaret Mitchell, as well as that of the slave owners she focused on, the O’Haras and the Wilkes family.
When I was growing up there were very few Black people in Klamath Falls. At the end of the nineteenth century the State of Oregon passed laws—later repealed—to keep them out. The only Black person I ever saw as a teenager, apart from the waiters and bedmakers in the Pullman cars on the trains running between San Francisco and Seattle, and the Black actors in films like Gone With the Wind, was a classmate in high school, Lester Bishop. He was voted “Most Stylish” by his graduating class of 1944, two years ahead of mine. He must have had a family, parents, and perhaps siblings, but I never saw them. His father may have been one of those commanding Black Pullman car waiters that one was in awe of on the Southern Pacific trains passing through Klamath Falls.
Lester, I well remember, had a snappy and individualistic wardrobe style, more personal and interesting than those of my gang and myself, in our slobbish, faded, and rolled-up corduroy pants and Arrow shirts, which was THE look. Lester’s stated ambition was to become a singer, and I now realize that he may possibly have been gay. If he ever gave me, or my finery, bought in a San Francisco men’s store, so much as a glance, he must surely have been thinking, “one of us, obviously!”
Of equal interest to me was another history of masters and slaves which has lasted my whole life: Ancient Egypt. I immersed myself in that world as I moved away from the story of Tara and the burning of Atlanta. I sorted out the dynastic periods of Egyptian history and art. I could tell whether a pharaoh’s portrait came from the Old Kingdom or the New (and from the Middle). I knew all the names of the pharaohs’ glorious eighteenth dynasty, and could rattle these off too, and often did for any of my friends who would listen to me when I was a freshman in high school.
I would chant in my breaking voice: “Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh, and the only one! Thutmose the Third, Amenhotep the second and third, then a fourth Thutmose,” and so on. This was the dynasty of the boy-king Tutankhamun, of the fabulous tomb treasures, and of the eternally beautiful Queen Nefertiti, with her long neck, today’s icon of modern female beauty. It was the dynasty of her husband Akhenaten, the heretic ruler, whom the composer Philip Glass wrote an opera about 3,000 years later. As an old man I went to see it nine times and was thrilled by the singing as I sat there in London, and then New York, thinking a bit smugly, “I knew all of these people, even as a child.”
My father helped me after we returned from Palm Springs to construct a Thebes on the floor of my bedroom in Klamath Falls, with temples, palaces, and wooden obelisks, over which the cleaning girl had to step carefully when she came to change my bed and dust. But all of this is taking me too far away from my life in Palm Springs.
There I soon found nice shops that attracted me, and I had a critical eye for how some of these shops decorated their windows; my eye had most likely been sharpened by earlier family trips to San Francisco. There was a little jewelry store exhibiting enchanting pieces of beautifully made miniature eighteenth-century silver—tea sets, chocolate pots, sauce boats shaped like a Renaissance helmet, serving platters with a rocaille border. These were all quarter-of-an-inch to a foot in scale, and hallmarked “M” for Meyers, the craftsman who had made them in New Jersey. I saved my allowance and in time could buy the little silver helmet, which I still have. There were nice men’s shops too, selling knitted shirts like Bob Hoover’s, and sharp shoes like his. Sometimes I asked the shopkeeper to put away a pair of socks or a T-shirt until I could bring my mother in. There was one shop displaying a pair of shrunken human heads from some Latin American tribe. These were not for sale; they were just curiosities, to attract people to come into the shop, but I went in again and again to get a better look and had a horror of touching them. Esthetically these could not compare with the unloosened Egyptian mummies of important pharaohs I saw pictures of in books, which sometimes still possessed a dignified beauty. Those were the proud faces of great sleeping kings.
We would not become friends; I did not interest him in any way. All I ever had of him was the sound of his new voice.We had a badminton court at the side of our house, Whispering Sands, where for sure the sidewinders slithered about at night. My mother and I would bat the little feathered badminton bird back and forth to each other over the net. Our court adjoined, across a fence, a cute next door neighbor’s house, another boy like myself, who, I had somewhat learned, was only age 12, but whose voice had already begun to change and deepen. I did not know my neighbor’s name, but he interested me at once. Yet we were never to become friends, and for some reason he did not go to my junior high. He was blonde. Whenever I saw him moving about through a window, I stopped to watch him, and felt desire for the first time in my life. I longed to be his friend, and to touch him. When I heard his deep voice from across our fence, I stopped what I was doing at Mimosa Plantation. And knew too, that he must never learn of it. We would not become friends; I did not interest him in any way. All I ever had of him was the sound of his new voice.
We all came back to Klamath Falls to its meager spring, without my having looked at my penis again. But in July, while taking a bath, I decided to break my vow. At this, a sharp tingling ran down my spine in expectation. If I were now to direct a scene about a man who had vowed never to look again at his penis, I would provide a crescendo of music at the moment he poked himself up through the soapy bathwater to be viewed. I was in no way disappointed by what I saw; I was both bigger and longer than the last time I had looked at myself. I reported the new-found pleasure of this early sin to my confessor, in my sometimes still too high voice, and he—a shadowy figure turned away in profile, who had not seen my face—told me I should find a husband and get married. “Married?” I cried, “I’m only 14! And I’m a boy!” Often, after that, only half-joking, when I am asked the date of my birth, I say, “July 8, 1942.”
Palm Springs was where I learned my first dance steps, the Conga, at a little dance for graduating eighth graders, and I energetically took it up.
*
It would be thirty-three years until I went back to Palm Springs, taking my partner, Ismail Merchant with me. One weekend we drove there from nearby Riverside, where we were making our film, The Wild Party. Truman Capote was living in Palm Springs by then. An agent—maybe his, maybe ours—had told us that Capote had written a screenplay that had never been produced. A meeting with him was set up, and we drove to the address we’d been given where we could find him. It was in a modest house for such a successful and famous author. But once inside, he told us there was no unproduced screenplay. Just scraps of already produced (or discarded) screenplays no one would want. Nothing to get excited about. An unknown, un-produced, original screenplay by Truman Capote, written at this stage of his career, if available, would be an event—a fact I may have murmured to him. Ismail, for sure, most likely shouted this out. Capote said he had seen Shakespeare Wallah and had liked it. This must have been so. Why else would Capote have agreed to see the two of us? Our own fame was far off in the future. A Room With a View was only a glint in the eye of our long-time writer, Ruth Jhabvala, and was a decade away.
From almost the moment we stepped into Capote’s living room he had one question, and one only: Did we know, had we ever met, Gore Vidal? Did we admire his work? Seen anything of his? We had not, nothing at all, we told him, and had no opinion about Gore Vidal. We were just two guys who had made, for unknown reasons, four films in India and an American flop called Savages, which people in the know now speak of with enthusiasm.
We decided to have dinner together and asked Capote to direct us to a favorite restaurant, which he did. What kind of food we ate I can’t remember. Could it have been Mexican? It could well have been; I liked Mexican food, but perhaps Truman Capote hated it. I do remember that both he and I had a lot to drink. After dropping Capote back at his house, Ismail and I drove to Riverside. He had wasted none of his famous wit on us, nor did he suddenly turn on us after some unfortunate remark we made, as he was famous for doing. It was a mild, perhaps a momentarily exhausted Truman Capote that we sought out in Palm Springs that night, when Gore Vidal was very much on his mind.
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“Back to Palm Springs” by James Ivory appears in A Fucking Magazine, a new magazine headed by Feeld and edited by Haley Mlotek and Maria Dimitrova.
