Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (11 page)

While disappointed with the rejection, Steward nonetheless found Algeria to be “a thoroughly hedonistic and leisurely vacation.” During his three weeks there, he had sex not only with his guide, but also with two Algerian soldiers. He later described these experiences in an erotic correspondence:

After taking leave of Mohammed (giving him a generous gift of money and his Chicago address
^*
), Steward hastened back to France—for a note had just arrived from Stein telling him to make haste, for “we are all afraid of war.”
^*

Arriving back at Bilignin, he found his former room now occupied by Sir Francis Rose and Cecil Beaton. The very stylish Beaton took absolutely no interest in Steward, but Rose, who at five years younger than Beaton was exactly Steward’s age, got on very well with him indeed—so well, in fact, that the two immediately began a friendship that would last for twenty-five years. Steward seems to have found in Rose a sort of doppelgänger, for despite their vastly different backgrounds and circumstances, Rose, too, had struggled throughout his life to reconcile an artistic vocation with a wildly adventurous (and self-destructive) sex life. Over the next thirty years, Steward would not only write several drafts of a novel based on Rose, but also save his correspondence, and even document various events in his life quite thoroughly in his memoir of Toklas and Stein.

Rose, unlike Steward, felt that the working-class men he preferred were fundamentally different from him. His memoirs note, “I was [always] fascinated by what were termed ‘the lower orders’ by my mother, and less generously ‘the great unwashed’ by Granny.” He nonetheless enjoyed having sex with “the great unwashed” from early adolescence onward; the danger, transgression, and perceived self-degradation of these escapades contributed significantly to their erotic appeal.

Like Steward, Rose was bookish as well as artistic, and he had a playful, imaginative nature. His Scottish father, Sir Cyril Stanley Rose, had died when he was five, leaving him a small fortune and a baronetcy; his eccentric (and independently wealthy) Franco-Spanish mother, Laetitia Rouy, had subsequently preferred to live abroad. As a result, Rose had been involved since early adolescence with the French avant-garde—particularly with Jean Cocteau and his circle, whom he had come to know at the Welcome Hotel at Villefranche-sur-Mer. There he had befriended Isadora Duncan, Mary Butts, Glenway Wescott, Natalie Barney, Radclyffe Hall, Monroe Wheeler, Christian (“Bébé”) Bérard, Max Jacob, and even the young George Platt Lynes—just then a recent Yale dropout.

By his early twenties (if his memoirs are to be believed) this wealthy, well-connected, opium-addicted young man had become closely associated with Captain Ernst Röhm, the first leader of the Nazi SA, to whom he had been introduced in Berlin in 1930 by his godfather, Franz von Papen.
^*
Rose subsequently began a close, loving (but—he insisted—nonsexual
^*
) four-year relationship with Röhm, who was twenty-three years his senior, in 1930. At the same time, he had his first major painting exhibition in Paris, sharing space with a kindred spirit, Salvador Dalí, at the gallery of Marie Cuttoli.
^*
His introduction to Gertrude Stein took place shortly afterward, in 1931, when she bought one of his paintings. He would continue to exhibit and sell his paintings in London, Chicago, New York, and Paris throughout the 1930s.

When Ernst Röhm was assassinated on Hitler’s “Night of the Long Knives,”
^*
Rose had been away from the house they shared in Bavaria, recuperating from hepatitis at his villa on the Riviera. The news of the murder devastated him; he subsequently left Europe to travel extensively in Asia, and finally to set up residence in Peking. He remained there, becoming friendly with the similarly half-English, Catholic, and homosexual aesthete Harold Acton (then also living in self-imposed exile) until both were driven out by the Japanese invasion of 1937. In 1938, Rose lost the better part of his fortune when Richard Whitney, the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange (to whom he had given power of attorney), was convicted of engaging in a massive embezzlement scheme and simultaneously declared bankrupt. To make matters worse, Rose had picked up a handsome young American criminal on his travels back to Europe who subsequently defrauded him of his one significant remaining asset, his villa in the hills above Cannes. Thus at the time of his first meeting with Steward, Rose was in complete financial ruin.

Steward found that Rose had artistic tastes and interests remarkably similar to his own. Rose had been inspired early on by Beardsley, Wilde, and Huysmans, for his Catholic paternal grandmother had introduced him to the work of all three. Moreover, like Steward, Rose had been electrified by the Ballets Russes. He was also particularly devoted to (and inspired by) Cocteau, who seemed to him to embody the contemporary French ideal of dandyism, aestheticism, and intellectual achievement. Rose later noted in his memoir that “like Icarus plunging into the sea, so was I plunged into that renaissance which is personified by that brilliant human firework, Jean Cocteau.”

Though Toklas thought him a particularly difficult houseguest, Rose had been a frequent visitor to the Stein-Toklas homes in Paris and Bilignin for nearly eight years by the time Steward met him; he would also eventually illustrate two books by Stein and
The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book
. Stein had collected Rose’s paintings steadily since 1933, and would ultimately own nearly a hundred of them. Cecil Beaton perhaps described him best, as “an Englishman…who looks like Toulouse-Lautrec and in graces is of the Horace Walpole period and in manner like an intelligent spinster. He is in character and tastes very much like Miss Stein and Miss Toklas.”
^*

Rose had warm (if hazy) recollections of meeting Steward during the 1939 visit with Stein and Toklas in his memoirs, noting, “Sam Steward, a friend of Gertrude and Alice, was there too, and I enjoyed his company. He was a young professor of history [
sic
] from Chicago who had a great love for France but the wit of a cultured American. With him one always had great fun.” Steward in turn would write of Rose, “I liked Francis. I did not find him ‘wicked and evil’ (to use another of Gertrude’s phrases about him); I think that she was afraid he would ‘corrupt’ me.” The fact that Stein feared for Steward’s innocence is, if nothing else, an indication of just how little she knew of his private life, and how much (by comparison) she knew of Rose’s—for his sexual indiscretions were legion.

During the visit to Bilignin, Steward had an extraordinarily intimate discussion with Stein, one that she apparently initiated in response to his “Chicago” novel. Steward later reconstructed the conversation from the extensive daily notes he had taken in shorthand while visiting:

Steward had brought his graphically sexual novel to Paris in order to submit it to the one commercial publisher who had succeeded up to that moment in putting literary homosexual novels into print, and he was now having a significant discussion with a major literary figure about the ways in which homosexual acts could be brought into the cultural dialogue. But that novel would never be published, and Stein would never record the particulars of her conversation with Steward. Steward himself would allow more than thirty-five years to pass before publishing his own account of this conversation with Stein, out of respect for her and Toklas’s privacy. Toward the end of his life, Steward recalled (again, only in his unpublished autobiography) that Stein had not been at all averse to the violent sexual content of his “Chicago” novel (including violent castration, a theme used two decades later by Tennessee Williams in
Sweet Bird of Youth
), but rather only to its obsession with street language and slang. “Gertrude…said…the thing that was wrong with Wendell [Wilcox]’s and Saroyan’s and my novel-writing was that we were all haunted by the spoken word.” The memory of her openness to his experimentation with sexual themes would sustain him in the years to come, even though she had told him quite bluntly that the “Chicago” novel was a failure.

•

By August 28 a declaration of war seemed so imminent that Stein advised Steward to leave as quickly as possible for Le Havre before the ports were closed. The
Normandie
had been scheduled to depart on September 6; unaware that it had never left New York, Steward boarded a train for Le Havre via Paris and so began a long and extremely difficult trip home.

In a note to Stein and Toklas written en route from Rouen, he described Paris as “ghastly” but went on to note that he had met up with Francis Rose at the “Cafe de Flore. [Where Francis] was tremendously upset—not over war, but leaving Cecil [Beaton].” After visiting Rose’s lavish apartment on the Ile St. Louis, Steward and Rose “ate together, then had a tour of the bad places. There were some adventures…If
Normandie
doesn’t sail, [I] will enlist. Could do something perhaps.”

Though he arrived in Le Havre to discover the
Normandie
missing, Steward managed to obtain a last-minute berth on the S.S.
Harding
even as six thousand other panicked American passengers were redirected to Bordeaux. From his improvised bunk in a cargo hatch of the desperately overcrowded ship, Steward wrote Stein and Toklas: