About Author: Hilton Als

She died in 2007 although she would object to that word–died. Let’s just say that the late swami and musician and mother, Alice Coltrane, was transformed into another element in 2007, and it was such a feeling, her transformation, let me tell you, the whole thing, the whole Alice-ness of it, lifting the spirit out of the body, what a gorgeous woman, one of the last true super models because of the way her outside met her inside. A year after she died, in 2008, the artist Diego Cortez invited me to a program that had been put together in her honor at the Concert Hall at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. The show was to begin at eight o’clock. Some time in June. The sun had yet to set. I remember long rays of it–the sun–leading people down the street, I remember the dark wood paneling of the concert hall, and I remember taking off the shoes that Darryl had given me years ago and dancing in the aisles when her 1970 piece, “Journey in Satchidananda,” came over the PA system, and I remember dancing in the aisles because the music lifted us up, all of us, and I remember having not done that since I was a kid–dancing in the aisles, crying, my nose running, pure joy–and the occasion then was sneaking out of the house and leaving Brooklyn to see James Brown at the Apollo with cousin Donna. But it was the same thing, really, the lifting up Up UP of a collective spirit, and I hadn’t felt that since the early nineteen-nineties in AIDS survivor groups, when, suddenly, in the midst of so much torment, there would be a ball of feeling, all of our feelings put together in one ball, and it would rise in the small room of torment and that airborne ball of feeling was our torment lifting up and away from our bodies but not our memories of our pure joy, the gone and not gone beloved ones. As Alice Coltrane was a beloved one. And so I danced not just for Alice in June, but for the others, and James Brown, and Darryl and his shoes and Diego, and all the people present because all the people were present no matter what their incarnation and their presence made up that June evening as we knew it.

Barbara

Hilton Als

– August 16, 2013

It’s June. Barbara Epstein passed away on June 16th, seven years now. June: the month to lose poetry. If you knew her, you will remember what her laughter sounded like, now that you have a visual. First there’d be the intake of breath, then one short burst of merriment out, followed by an escalating sound that might never stop–a girlish sound, promising more merriment, but never negative, because it was her job to protect people from their worst self and best self. When I was moving to Berlin for a time, she hugged me around the neck and said, by way of a send off (dinner preceded this): “Honey, I want you to find love over there. We talk about it all the time.” The “we” she was referring to were her friends, her family, the world: she only shut you out if you were stupid or mean enough to use other people, not honor the family, betray confidences, allow yourself to be defined by envy. She loved “Gore,” and she loved you and you–to her, everyone was a star, and it was her privilege as an editor, a mother, a friend, to shine her people up, make them shinier to themselves. She adored her grand children, and the poets she had known as a young scholarship student at Radcliffe where one poet likened her striking style of dress in those pre-Eisenhower years, to something out of “Annie Hall”–distinct, American, and original. She was all of those things. She was amused by the romance of fame–in others. Once, I asked her what a famous friend of hers was “really,” like and she said: “Well, she’s a masochist, which is ALWAYS adorable.” Having dinner at her place was one of the occasions you looked forward to, because it was fun to talk baby talk to her–one felt like a sexy baby in her presence–because she wasn’t formidable to herself, just herself, and it was that self that would take care of you, even if you didn’t know that’s what you were asking for when you saw her. Does New York even produce girls like this anymore? Once, we went to a party at the Pierre together. We got off the elevator, and walked down a long pink hall. Eerie feelings about a mother. I opened the door to what I took to be our host’s apartment, but it was the kitchen. Arching her eyebrow, Barbara said: “Purely instinctual.” And we laughed. She had the best kind of humor because it was never a put down; why would she do that, when the world put everyone she cared about down enough? I never heard her say an unkind word about anyone. She could feel angry, yes, but what was the point of malice? I miss her all the time and if things were reversed she would miss me all the time. Over the years, the personnel in her apartment building changed. First there were black elevator men, etc., then everyone was Russian. Arriving at her apartment one night, I pointed that out. She said: “Honey, the blacks are out. Come on in!” Another time we were discussing the critic Anataole Broyard, and the recent disclosure that he was black. She said: “Honey, we always knew he was black. He was too good looking! With that shaved head….” She said: “Honey, you lose so many things in life, you can’t worry about it.” She said, when some personal matters got out of hand: “Honey, you have to work.” And then she went silent when I said I couldn’t leave X situation, or Y person; her silence when your self-destruction was greater than her wish was deafening. She believed in me, and I believed in her, and it has taken me years to act as fully as possible on her belief in me. In our last e-mail exchange, I told her she had to conserve her strength so she could get well, and she wrote: “I know. But I miss you. B”

Mrs. Loving’s Overcoat

Hilton Als

– August 16, 2013

Mrs. Loving had a cloth overcoat, and it had a fur collar. She wore that overcoat when she took her three children–two boys and a girl–shopping in her local grocery store in Central Point, Virginia, a state she had no business being at that time–1965 or so–but her family lived there, and her husband, Richard’s, family lived there: it was their home. In her overcoat, Mrs. Loving nodded kindly to the people she saw at the grocery as she put this and that into her cart, minding her pennies, minding her children. The children had Richard’s teeth–crooked–and her mouth–long and wide. She loved all her children equally, and Richard loved them all equally, too. But first Mr. Loving loved Mrs. Loving. They had grown up in the same world–small, segregated Central Point–where their respective families had always known each another and there was relatively little trouble about any of that black and white business because that was just the way it was. Sometimes lovers start off loving one another forever by not liking one another at all. Who doesn’t understand that. Love is always trouble. At first Mildred Delores didn’t like Richard; she thought he was a show off, nothing more. But then love happened, and she wanted to live in his smell forever. She was so skinny he called her Stringbean, later Bean, and she called him Richard. They both smoked, and talked about the future. She loved language, and ideas; he was a believer, and held onto his silence. She was a beautiful woman, in or out of her overcoat. And he was handsome in the way of a man who was unmindful of, while living in, his masculinity. The reason they married was this: at eighteen, Mildred got pregnant. But they couldn’t get married in their home state–it was illegal. To do so would be to contradict Virginia’s Racial Equality Act of 1924, which made interracial marriage a crime. So, they became the Lovings in Washington, D.C. The pregnancy was just one reason to get married, really; the others were more important: the way he called her Bean; the way she kissed him when he went off during the day to make a living. After they married, the Lovings returned to Central Point. One night, a jealous person–someone who did not love the Lovings–called the law on them, and they were arrested. (The police busted them at night, hoping to catch the couple having sex, another offense against God, the law, the hateful.) It was 1959. They were sentenced to a year in prison, but the sentence was suspended if they left Virginia. They moved to Washington, D.C., where they began their family while missing their families, the earth. They hated the city and it’s uglier, harder, poverty–it’s meaner segregation. They couldn’t travel to Virginia together. In 1964, Mrs. Loving, soft spoken but practical and determined, wrote to the then Attorney General, Robert Kennedy. She told them her story, and the story of her husband and children. Kennedy referred her to the ACLU; then their case went to the Supreme Court, which, eventually, ruled in the Lovings favor. While their case went through the courts, the Lovings returned to Central Point and lived with their kids as a kind of open secret. In their home town the Lovings lived in cleaner air, and their children climbed trees, and Richard held Bean and all their secrets. After the law changed, the Lovings lived together in full view of people who loved them, and other people who didn’t love them. Sometimes, at night, I like to imagine what they said to one another in the dark, some summer crickets outside making a comfortable racket, as they talked about the future, Mrs. Loving’s overcoat in the closet I turn to now, remembering when I was Mrs. Loving to his loving and attentive Richard.

The Family

Hilton Als

– August 14, 2013

Several weeks ago, a new friend was in town, and, as is my habit with friends old and new, I took him for a walk on the Christopher Street piers, but is that what one calls them anymore? When I think of the piers of yore, let’s say during the “Paris is Burning,” era, and before, my mind’s eye blinks with memories of: old broken wooden pylons, a scummy river, cruisy, sometimes mustachioed men who did and did not look like Al Pacino as they took up the hunt once again—what would exhaust them? That would come later, with AIDS, and then again with crystal meth, and then again with the galvanizing effect of hope, and real love, and the acceptance of life’s true companions—and then there were the various queens of both sexes and all races who could not afford a room at the Jane Hotel, and who could not bring their lovers home to their parents. So, they hung out and made love and cursed one another and had each other’s backs on the Christopher Street piers, which, during the late nineteen-seventies, and all through the eighties, always looked as though it was about to sink into the river. I am drawn to water—it’s my favorite element, right up there with the smell of bodies I like, or like to admire—and there is no better way to get to know someone than to take them to see some water: it makes people reflective, and when people are reflective, you can hear their innermost thoughts, even if they don’t say them. My young friend wanted to know about the people on the pier, and I told him that while some of the players may have changed and clothing styles had changed, along with certain verbal expressions and some self-protective viciousness or long suffering silence, it had always been a predominately gay world, the only place some people could afford to make a family in, and feel safe in, and looked after, and it’s my hope, in this new world, I’m telling my friend now, that public pockets of declared queer love and freedom like the Christopher Street piers, won’t be eradicated in the inevitable rush to feel less than different.

Elvis Costello

Hilton Als

– August 14, 2013

For a time the best lyricist and the best singer about a world that would not have him. His early pigeon-toed stance of belligerence was the visual manifestation of one’s secret internal desire to make love to the school bully and then turn that love against him/her. Costello was out of Dickens, the smelly boy in the back row smelling his fingers as he wrote every hurt down, but one can’t imagine Costello reading Dickens–that would take too long, and, besides, Dickens would have explained too much for Costello’s taste, and why should hate be explained? He wasn’t a punk, exactly, because he was a craftsman, first–he would not let his anger get the best of his lyricism–but his resentment got the best of love. In those early albums he sang, over and over again, and very quickly, about lipstick vogue, and watching the detectives, and not getting pumped up with some girl, but what became clear, after a time, is that, like most stars, he resented not being treated like the girl–the star. So, he made his own band, a great one, where he was not so much the frontman as he was the ugly sister to his dream of being beautiful, desired, treasured. He was inconsolable on stage, and in his music, and no amount of love could satiate him, which was why we loved him: we couldn’t fill him up, and that can be a kind of turn on, too.

Montgomery Clift

Hilton Als

– August 14, 2013

To my mind and eye, Montgomery Clift is the greatest film actor this country has ever produced, largely because he jettisoned acting out for acting in. While others feel that Brando was the Greatest Ever, Clift didn’t rely on what Brando never left behind: the conventional stage, and the predictable mechanics of theatricalization. But Brando was smart enough about the human psyche to understand that it thrives on the known, and that “sexiness,” depends on declaring itself outright: audiences don’t want to dig for it since they spend so much time at home, digging for their own. Brando was a master showman who was perfectly well aware, too, that the actor–the walking figment of one’s imagination–increases his power over an audience if he can convince them of this imagined fact: he’ll break the fourth wall (or screen) and claim them. And isn’t that what everyone wants, ultimately–to be claimed? Clift, a much more recessive personality and controlled screen artist, couldn’t find himself in bombast, and it was his constant reducing during a scene–hand gestures that quieted down after a while, and then stopped; a slight jerking of his small frame when Marilyn Monroe extends her compassion in a bottle strewn junkyard in 1961’s literally and figuratively fantastic “The Misfits”– that was essential to his screen presence as well, that white flat movie place Clift filled with one character again and again: the unknown but often despised one. (This character reached his apex when Clift played Freud in John Huston’s 1962 bio-pic, or shall we say bio-poem? Original script? By Sartre!) Clift’s poetry was in the drama of emotional mishap: characters who didn’t like his character because he was a Jew, or a murderer, or Something Else. As such, he upstaged Hitchcock’s fabled love of cinema minimalism when he played a priest in the director’s strange 1953 film, “I Confess.” Clift’s utterly compelling under-the-emotional-radar-but-with heart-and-guilt-cutting-his-breath-short at-nearly-every-turn show underscores that, while Hitchcock hated “acting,” he didn’t know what to do when an actor was even better at being a “model,” then his rage and manipulation could demand. And since that tension doesn’t exist for Hitch with Clift, the movie is without tension. Another story about the modernist-minded performer: In 1961 he was making “Judgement at Nuremberg,” with Stanley Kramer. Judy Garland was in the film. Kramer invited Clift to watch a take featuring Judy, and when Kramer turned to Clift after the take was over, tears were streaming down Clift’s cheeks. Kramer: Ah, wasn’t Judy marvelous? Clift (crying): No. Because she’s playing her character’s tragedy even before she opens her mouth. While beautiful, Clift was rarely considered “sexy,” because he couldn’t even claim himself; his effects depended on you going in and finding his unspoken pain or joy–the erotics of silence–behind his pale skin, dark hair, and character defining posture. (A sensitive straight male acquaintance, explaining Clift to his girlfriend, who had never seen him in a film, said: Listen, I’m not into men at all, but with him. Wow.) While Brando played cowboys, Clift was the quintessential lonesome cowboy, a tumbleweed of reduced-for-the-camera everything: desperation, loneliness, hope. While it’s almost impossible to remember what Clift said in a movie, or how he said it, you can remember what Brando said because, despite his fabled laxness with the script, what he said was scripted; he was enough of a stage actor to believe it began with the playwright or screenwriter, while Clift’s modernism had little to do with language and everything to do with being watched, and letting the surrounding air be the improvisation. In silent film terms, Brando was Chaplin, and Clift, Keaton.