The Martin Duberman Reader (36 page)

Then—somehow—I got on to the Beats. The “how” in these matters always seems to me more than a little mysterious: I'd never been much interested in the Beats, or been much of a fan of their writings. It was only gradually that I came to see the actual locus of my newfound interest: the relationship between Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. Each had been the most important person in the other's life, but neither (and especially not Kerouac) could find ways to express it apart from the acceptable buddy-buddy ones: tough-guy heroics, all-night Benzedrine sessions, screwing together in whorehouses, sharing women, treating women like shit.

That, writ large, was the destructive tragedy of growing up macho male in America (or anywhere else, for that matter). Through the Kerouac-Cassady relationship, I wanted to write a play about the horrors of “manliness”—which so many heterosexual men seemed to believe accrued in direct proportion to the
absence
of tenderness. The tragedy, as I saw it, was that Kerouac as a young man was palpably tender. Yet the sweet person inside could never get out, or stay out. With liquor in him, he could be a brute and a bully. And the older he got, the more he drank, until finally he did little but drink, along with cursing the radical young he'd once inspired. Had Kerouac been able to connect profoundly with
anyone,
had he and Cassady been able to acknowledge the depth of their passion for each other—and I meant much more than sexual passion, and perhaps not
even
that—Kerouac might not have succumbed in his forties to alcoholism, and Cassady to a drug overdose.

Once that story grabbed hold of me I couldn't let it go. I knew it was likely to make Richmond apprehensive (to say the least), but I managed to persuade myself that the power and poignancy of the theme would somehow capture him—after all, I told myself, he
was
a gay man.

I began by reading through all of Kerouac's published work—
some twenty volumes of the stuff. And “stuff” is how I felt about much of it; a lot of Kerouac's “spontaneous writing” came across to me as just that, the work of someone high on bennies, unable (as Truman Capote once put it) to stop typing. I admired many sections of
On the Road, The Subterraneans,
and
The Dharma Bums,
but my real fascination was with the life, not the work.

The play became an amalgam of Kerouac's words and mine. I sometimes directly incorporated lines or phrases from Kerouac's own work (with permission from his estate); more often a sentence of his would trigger a continuation of my own, spark off a page of dialogue from me or, once in a while, a scene. Some of the events in the play I wholly imagined; some of the characters became composites that I created from several real-life figures. In the end, the amalgamation became so complete that within a short time of finishing the play I could no longer identify the constituent parts, disentangle the two voices.

I finished the first draft, a whopping 250 pages, in June 1975. Actor friends did a reading of it in my apartment to help me discover what sections needed reworking, and as a result I trimmed away sixty pages. It was now ready, I thought (doesn't one always?), to be seen. I gave it the title
Visions of Kerouac
—meaning to convey that it was a subjective meditation on Kerouac's life in much the way his own book
Visions of Cody
had been a meditation on Neal Cassady's. And off the play went to Richmond Crinkley.

One week turned into two, two into four. No word. My agent phoned Crinkley's office repeatedly, but got not a single return call. “Doubtless.” she said with feigned cheerfulness, “they're awaiting the arrival of the other five commissioned scripts before offering any comments. Why not use the time to do some of the those additional revisions you've been talking about?” So I did. By August, I'd completed another, still trimmer version. Off it, too, went to Richmond's office.

Now I started calling him myself. After a dozen tries, I was finally put through. He suggested a meeting, and my eager little heart soared. It shouldn't have. The meeting lasted half an hour.
Richmond nervously admitted that he had not yet “finished” the new version (it was clear from his comments that he'd never started it). But both he and Roger Stevens
had
read the original, and Richmond wanted me to know (his voice ominous) that “Roger thinks your play is too long.”

“Was that his
only
comment?” I asked, nonplussed.

“Mmm, yes.”

“That's reassuring.”

Richmond giggled, but said nothing.

“The script
was
too long,” I continued. “That's why I did a revision sixty pages shorter. I urge you to read it,” I added pointedly.

Richmond responded airily that of course he would, then confounded my gloom by declaring Arvin Brown's prestigious Long Wharf Theater his first choice as the tryout site for
Kerouac.
Before I could catch my breath, he was waving good-bye, off to another “urgent meeting.”

I didn't know what to make of it all.
Would
Richmond ever read the new version? Or had a negative decision already been reached on the basis of the subject matter alone, with the “excessive length” being merely a convenient excuse for turning the play down? If so, why had Richmond tossed off the prospect of a tryout at Long Wharf? Was it just to get me out of his hair?

Via Crinkley's assistant, Jack Hofsiss, word soon filtered in that the main office was sharply divided. Hofsiss himself was high on the play, Crinkley unwilling to commit, and the big boss Roger Stevens decidedly negative. That was bad news indeed, since it was Stevens who ultimately called the shots. There had probably never been much chance that he would take to
Kerouac.
This was the man, after all, who during a recent interview with the
Washington Post
had referred to the language in the film he called “The Cuckoo Flew Over the Roof” with “Jack Nichols” as “disgusting.” This was the same Roger Stevens who had rejected the Tony Award-winning play
Equus
for the Kennedy Center because he'd been offended by “its four-letter language and nudity.” Could I really expect him to embrace
a play about male love filled with raunchy Beat language and behavior? No, I could not.

Neither Stevens nor Crinkley was under any obligation to like my play simply because I wanted them to. But I did think writers—
commissioned
ones, no less—were entitled to less rude, evasive treatment. I told my agent to withdraw the script from the Kennedy Center and to start sending it out to other managements.

She did, but the reactions were hardly what I'd hoped for. “Too long,” said Circle Rep. “Too literary,” said the Chelsea Theater Center. The American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco liked the play but decided the cost of mounting it would be “prohibitive.” The producer Stuart Ostrow sent my agent a note that made me laugh—grimly—out loud: “Duberman has done a wonderful job. Wish it was a musical. But of course it shouldn't be.” The veteran producers Diana and Herman Shumlin took me to dinner at the Plaza Hotel to express their “enormous admiration” for the writing
and
their distaste for the contents. Sylvia Hersher, another long-established pro, told the agent she thought the play “not good—but
great
,” yet couldn't imagine who might actually be willing to stage it.

In the end, the Kennedy Center produced not one of the six commissioned plays—but I didn't know that in time to stanch the worst of the bleeding. Nor did the failure to carry off the Bicentennial season prevent Richmond Crinkley from being chosen in 1979 to head the theater at Lincoln Center (disastrously, in the opinion of many). That same year, Jack Hofsiss—the good guy in my Kennedy Center melodrama—had a notable triumph directing the stage version of
The Elephant Man.

In 1978,
Kerouac
was produced to excellent reviews in L.A. But audiences proved thin and after about seventy performances it closed.

—compiled from
Partisan Review
no. 3, 1968 and no. 3, 1969;
SHOW,
January 1969 and February 1969;
Harper's,
May 1978 and December 1978

M
y friend Pete, he of the endless faith in alternative therapies, soon came up with another suggestion for me. He'd become involved recently in one of the new “body” therapies called “bioenergetics.” Pete claimed it had helped him enormously (but then he always said that) and recommended I give it a try. “What is bioenergetics?” I asked impatiently, my tone implying that I already knew it was a form of charlatanry.

Pete was patience itself, explaining that bioenergetics was an eclectic combination of body therapies “deriving from the work of Alexander Lowen,” and its chief practitioner in New York was a man named John Pierrakos. “Oh, Pete,” I moaned. “Give it up! We're talking about a body and psyche that've been pummeled and (purportedly) reshaped time and again, only to snap right back to their original form. It's time you accepted the reality of imprinting. I am what I am—and probably have been since age three.”

Pete nodded sagely. “Ummm . . .I hear you . . . except you do have a greater capacity for change than you like to admit, and have shown it over the years. You're not as fortified as you prefer to think. And despite your advanced years”—he smiled sweetly—“you could go right on changing.” (Thank God he didn't say “growing”! That would have scotched the deal right there.) “Why not try it?”
he added. “It's not like you've got anything better to do at the moment.” That was true enough. And so with a shrug, I agreed on impulse to go for a consultation.

When I arrived at John Pierrakos's office, it turned out he was an hour behind schedule. While waiting, I thumbed through the reading material on his end table, and found that most of it consisted of reprints of his own articles. Just another blowhard, I thought resentfully.
Why the hell did I let Pete talk me into this?
Picking up one of the articles, my eye lingered lovingly on every bloated abstraction—of which there were many: “We must create new concepts, new processes, and new leadership models for a New Age of Mankind”; “We must open to the benign nature of the universe, to the amplitude of life.”
Oh swell,
I thought;
Dr. Pangloss tacked on to a regimen of push-ups. Just what I don't need.
Yet I didn't bolt on the spot. Maybe because of the one line in the article that
did
impress me: “The more we feel the pain, the more we accept it, the less we feel it . . . when we accept the hurt we feel deeply, it gives us a sense of dignity.”

When Pierrakos called me into his inner office, it was immediately apparent that this was not a traditionally antiseptic psycho-therapeutic setting. On the wall were a photomural of Egyptian pictographs and a large anatomical diagram of the human torso with lines pointing to what were regarded (I later learned) as key “energy meridians.” Certain objects in the room seemed startlingly anomalous: a large wooden sawhorse, several oversized plastic baseball bats, three or four huge beanbags doubling as oversized pillows. The desk and two chairs were standard issue.

Pierrakos was a trim, handsome man with graying hair and a classically chiseled face. I guessed him to be in his early fifties. He motioned me to one of the chairs and we began to talk, along the standard lines I had long since grown accustomed to in traditional psychotherapy. He asked what had brought me to his office. I explained my connection to Pete, my ambivalence about therapy of any kind, my conviction that it was “too late” for me to hope for any major personality transformation.

Until recently, I said, I'd viewed my life as successful and stable.
I had few overt fears, enjoyed my work, had a surfeit of acquaintances (and even a few friends), had given up on the “adolescent” notion of a “lifetime partner,” was content with occasional (sometimes paid) sexual adventures with mostly younger men, and had told myself (and everyone else, including Pete) that I was no longer interested in any basic reorientation of my life, and certainly not of my sexuality. I wanted to focus my energies on becoming more of what I already was: I wanted to deepen, not spread.

I paused, thinking Pierrakos might make some comment, give some clue about his reaction thus far. But he simply sat there quietly, waiting for me to continue. The events of the past two years, I went on, had shaken my complacency. I had, despite expectations, gotten deeply, romantically, involved with a man, and had been left by him. The shock of that, in combination with my mother's illness, had left me feeling disconsolate. Such hope as I could muster—and what had brought me to his office—came from Pete's conviction, more than mine, that the non-traditional therapy of bioenergetics might be a way of dynamiting my fortified defenses, even though I wasn't at all sure what bioenergetics was or whether I wanted my defenses breached.

On a deeper level, I said, I suspected that I'd come to him because I was, by nature, an “impossibilist”: a man who continues to seek what cannot be had, whose tenacious will refuses to capitulate to the preordained, who insists he can still be “happy” when all the evidence suggests he can't.

Pierrakos listened attentively. So attentively that I felt unnerved, and in a distancing gesture I suddenly started complaining about his article. “This business of a ‘benign universe,' ” I heard myself say. “I have to tell you that it makes me uncomfortable.”

“Why is that?” Pierrakos asked amiably.