Until I read riveting (and intimidating) excerpts from Thomas Mallon's journal of the plague years in The New Yorker earlier this year--which mentioned men jumping out of windows when diagnosed with AIDS, an image subsequently hijacked by 9/11--I hadn't paid much attention to his mostly historical novels, although I do recall skimming A Book of One's Own : People and Their Diaries and nearly giving up writing in my journal as a result.
But the imagined back story of a gay, B celebrity piqued my interest. Initially, I dismissed it as a genre exercise--definitely not my thing--until I slowly began to realize how perfectly Mallon had mapped the geography of MY Manhattan and paid moving tribute to the generation of gay men who preceded us in the devil's playground. Of course I knew it wouldn't end well for Matt Liannetto as soon as night sweats entered the picture but he does get a happy ending of sorts with a Puerto Rican police informer, perhaps the book's most unrealistic character.
He was a diamond in the rough," I respond. "Sort of like you." I squeezed his hand for a second, and then compulsively pressed the button on my new digital watch, cupping my palm around its face to shield my fellow theatergoers [they're in the Broadway audience at Amadeus in 1983 ] from its glowing numerical display [imagine such consideration today!]. Over the last few months the magically changing integers had increased my sense of time's fleetingness. The second hand of my old watch had made its eternal orbits; the new one's ever-changing digits somehow seemed to warn that everything was heading toward an end point.
But I was happy. For one thing, I had never in my life felt the sort of envy that contorts Salieri when he realizes all of the wonders inside Mozart's head. I'd been glad to be quite good at the little thing I did [Matt is an accompanist] rather than I tried to do.
Dick Kallman and Dolores Gray, however, are not, although Gray's legacy on You Tube is a lot more substantial than Kallman's. Both are terrible people in Mallon's telling, and partners in the crimes of self-deception and fraud. If the book were just about them, I probably would have put it down but Mallon cleverly introducing his very own Rosebud which kept me turning the pages, and not just because I wanted to know why Matt had come into possession of a bejeweled fraternity pin.
And this is where I also must admit that Mallon's alchemy of fact and fiction bothered me. Initially, I thought Kenneth Nelson, the sweet ingenue who broke Kallman's heart was fictional because I didn't recognize his name and the reviewers hadn't mentioned that he played Michael, the rather loathsome character in the 1970 film of The Boys in the Band. How could anyone have carried a torch for him?!
Ironically, casting directors in Hollywood felt the same way, even though the Hollywood Foreign Press Association gave him a "Best Newcomer" nomination (along with Joe Namath!) Gay stigma prevented him from ever getting another starring role, and like most of the rest of the film's cast, he eventually died of AIDS. Kallman never had to face that music because he was murdered in 1980.
