Fairy Godfather
In May of 1985, my first play, Bonds & Options, was in rehearsals at New York University. I was renting a futon in an alcove in Flushing where the cockroaches did compulsory exercises, Gangnam Style, on the kitchen countertops, and I took the 7 train into Manhattan five days a week. One Wednesday afternoon I scored standing room for a matinee of Big River, a musical version of Huckleberry Finn with a Roger Miller score that had opened to positive reviews at the tail end of a dismal Broadway season. I was already feeling like one lucky show queen when, with three minutes to curtain, an attractive older gentleman approached me at the rail and said that he had an extra seat in the orchestra. Would I like to sit with him?
A free ticket cleared a low bar in my twenties. During the decade when Psychology Today and Sally Jessy Raphael invented self-esteem, I was yours for the night if you bought me a White Russian and called me cute. My fast behind, however, was at odds with my heart, which believed in marriage-type love and fidelity’s bit and bridle. With the fervor of the situational Catholic, I would begin rationalizing my prospects at Uncle Charlie’s on Greenwich Avenue after a second round. This Drew or Ted or Ken saying such sweet things right now might, seven hours later on his pillow in the rosy-fingered dawn, turn out to be my one and only and forever. Like Moll Flanders and Odette de Crécy, I was a wanton susceptible to reform—provided the sex was fantastic.
While taking our seats, the suave, sandy-haired Bill revealed that he was a Tony voter. A palpable hit. When asked, I confessed haltingly—it sounded so pretentious—that I wrote plays. Just as the lights were going out, Bill provided an even greater stimulant: “I was Tennessee Williams’ last agent.”
Curtain up on Big River. Oh look, there’s the Widow Douglas and Huck and—was that a Patek Phillipe pressing its icy face against my forearm? All I can remember from Act One is Huck’s yearning pre-prise of a ballad called “Waiting for the Light to Shine”—tuneful and short and sweet enough for Bill to take my hand in his. A romantic too! Bill was going to read Bonds & Options and sign me to his agency; we’d move the show from Tisch School of the Arts to the Cherry Lane Theater and then sell it to Paramount…it was all going to start happening for me. Thank you, Clotho and Mark Twain and Roger Miller.
Leaving at intermission, Bill scribbled his address on an ICM business card and invited me to his apartment that evening to help him vote on the Tony Awards. Had ever a more glamorous summons been issued? “Tell me if they play our song again,” he said. He really did care. Post-show I rushed to a payphone at the corner of 49th and 8th Avenue. My friend Diane, chained to her trading desk at First Boston, gave me permission to sleep with Bill and shrewdly advised bringing along a copy of my play.
Dinner for six on Bill’s penthouse terrace was a surprise. I recall neither the menu nor a single thing about the other guests. As the sun set over the East River, I do remember tipping my Ray-Ban Wayfarers, a freshly rediscovered fashion accessory in the eighties, down from my forehead. “Vexed” is a mild descriptor for how I felt at being ignored for the entire meal. I wasn’t some mangina with eight inches who couldn’t use helping verbs. I had two Ivy League degrees and a play in rehearsal; I could offer an opinion about Big River in English and French; Bill plucked me from standing room. But the other guests—well, they’d seen and not heard my kind before. I was a sentence straight out of Fran Lebowitz’s 1978 essay, “Notes on Trick.”
Things improved when we were alone. He was my type. Southern. More Rhett than Ashley, or if the Kennedys had Carolina cousins…. He smelled nice. He had great teeth, and on the walls, there were framed lithographs with penciled number marks in the corners. On a chartreuse velvet couch, fortified with tumblers of bourbon, we voted a Big River straight ticket in the musical categories. Bill only insisted on Derek Jacobi for Best Actor in Much Ado About Nothing; “He’s one of us,” he said, pressing his hand into my crotch. I arched on cue, and sighed for good measure, but if we got started now, when were we going to discuss Bonds and Options, out of reach in a manila envelope on the bar cart?
A mirrored wall backed a bed overdressed in white. French doors opened onto a second, more private terrace. Bill waited until I was naked before he asked, “You wouldn’t happen to have that nasty virus that’s going around?” Maybe he was checking for KS lesions. I shook my head no. Acknowledging the existence of AIDS was prophylaxis enough for both of us. Safe sex guidelines had yet to be established. Gay men were relying on a patchwork of anecdote, hunch, and hoodoo.
Bill was into nipples, generally a side issue for me. Responding to his somewhat shopworn foreplay, I thought I was being spontaneous and encouraging, that is to say, effective, until I heard the crank-twist of a glass vial being opened. “Do you mind?”
“Not at all,” I replied, but my courtesan’s vanity pricked. I did mind. “Poppers?” I thought. “Really? That’s so seventies.” In the six years I had been having sex, no one had ever needed to bring inhalants or toys to my bed. But it was Bill’s bed, and Bill’s prerogative, and finally, it was Bill’s bull terrier, Opal, who, once let into the room, jumped in between us and began thrusting her dense, meaty snout in my ass crack—over and over—in an attempt to dislodge me from her rightful position next to Big Daddy. Opal had clearly read the Lebowitz essay too. I won that battle. Eventually.
In the morning, the guest bathrobe was sumptuous; the nickel shower head was the size of a sunflower, and, hoping for a full breakfast and a tumbler of fresh-squeezed juice, I emerged from the bathroom. Opal was snuffling and scrabbling at the other door. Still recumbent, Bill tapped his fingers on the comforter. Maybe we were going to do it again. Twice in eight hours, at his age, would cement our relationship. My sublet was ending July 1st. I would try not to stare at his weepy, elaborately bloodshot left eye. Just the left.
Bill gave me a naughty smile, then said, “You’ve got a big pimple on your chin,” as if I hadn’t noticed it in the bathroom mirror, which of course I had. “Yes,” I replied, covering it with a hand. Raised properly, I refrained from mentioning that his eye looked like a cherry Life Saver.
No sense dragging this out. Being called out for a skin blemish beyond my control so undid me, I refused even coffee and fled the penthouse. But in a final mixed message appropriate to the Trick that I had been that night, I forgot my Ray-Bans in the living room. Two days later Bill’s secretary called me in to retrieve them, along with Bonds & Options in my envelope. I waited until I reached the street to open it. On ICM stationery, he’d scrawled: “No one will read your play until you format it properly. Cheers. B.”
Four years later I opened the March 10th New York Times. In Section D, on page 16, there were two obituaries. Top left: Robert Mapplethorpe, Photographer, Dies at 42. Bottom, center right, above the death notices: Bill. His other clients had included Raquel Welch, Margaux Hemingway, and Ali McGraw. The cause of death—lymphoma—was an accepted euphemism of the time. It was more confirmation than shock. I had tested positive for HIV on Groundhog Day the year before.
James Magruder has published four books of fiction (Sugarless, Let Me See It, Love Slaves of Helen Hadley Hall, and Vamp Until Ready) and written the books for two Broadway musicals (Triumph of Love and Head over Heels). Yale Press will bring out his first—and last—book of non-fiction, titled The Play’s the Thing: Yale Repertory Theater 1966-2016 in September 2024.