Stories about my Father 21
It’s one thing writing about someone you know, but something else entirely when writing about somebody who died before you were born. How can you ever figure out who they were? My great uncle Scott had no children of his own, but he had a pack of younger nieces and nephews as well as my father and my aunt Helen. I wonder how many of them knew him. I am sure several of them met him but did they know him? Almost everything that I know about him comes from my father who I don’t think really got him at all. I find myself trying to piece the real him together from family asides and pictures.
Scott existed in a world apart from the rest of the family. He was an artist and, for a time, lived a heady life with an older man in a large Park Avenue apartment in New York. When they went out for dinner it was to a fancy restaurant where they wore top hats and tails. They lived among the rich and socially connected. Nobody else on that side of my family lived like that. I have heard him described with every euphonism in the book, but this great nephew of his is going to go out on a limb and make an assumption. It seems abundantly clear to me that my great uncle Scott was gay.
I worked with George Grizzard on the revival of A Delicate Balance which won him the Tony award. My ex had also worked with him on a straw-hat circuit production of Lend Me a Tenor, so I got to know him a bit. George was gay, but as far as I know, he never publicly came out. I’m not outing him now, it’s on his Wikipedia page. (I did check just in case.) George never made a secret of his homosexuality in his everyday life. He had a long-term partner. He flirted with me like crazy just as he did with all the boys. Even with the growing acceptance of same-sex relationships, though, he never felt comfortable talking about it on the record. When he was younger, had word gotten out, it would have ended his career. That fear never left him. The night he won his Tony, he sat with the actress Karen Valentine while his partner and Karen’s husband sat together up in the balcony. I found it all inexpressibly sad, but back in the day, that is what you did.
My great uncle was a full generation older than George. He never got to experience even the beginnings of a world where he would be accepted for who he was. When he was young, he was “delicate”. As he got older, that changed to “artistic” and maybe “theatrical.” Having experienced first-hand how George viewed life, I think I have a small window into what Scott’s life might have been like. There were places where he could be himself and places where he had to pretend to be someone else. I still need to do that sometimes, even now. I feel a connection to him that I don’t necessarily feel with anyone else in the family. In one regard because of our shared sexual preference but in another because of the worlds we lived in. We both spent large parts of our lives hobnobbing with the rich and famous. A big difference between us, though, I think, is that I have never felt the need to stay in that high-toned world, whereas from everything I’ve found out about him, he did.
He was five years younger than my grandmother and, even though she probably had no idea what he was talking about most of the time, he adored her. They shared a love of art. She was a painter, and he was an illustrator and a designer. I have a letter from him to my grandmother that he wrote in 1919. He was 16 and was working at the J.R. Millner Company in Lynchburg. The letter is full of little drawings and brims with excitement.
“Dear heart, I fairly bristle with news. It sticks out all around me. I cast it forth. It radiates from me. Things have been happening so fast lately that I am really in a jumble.” During that 4th of July weekend, the time he wrote this, his mother, my great grandmother, was about four months pregnant with my great aunt Martha, whose conception and arrival on the scene was a total surprise to everyone.
“This was the eventful beginning of an eventful weekend. That night, Daddy went to the cousins and got home about eleven o’clock. Mother marches into his room and then commences activities. Well, the fight lasted for about two hours. I could hear insults being hurled from Mother to Daddy and then from Daddy back to Mother. All the things that had happened in the past twenty years were brought up and discussed at length. So after a pleasant evening on both sides, the party adjourned and both combatants retired to their respective beds. There to mumble half the night. Poor E (the cat) and I were in mortal terror all the time the conflict was going on. The cat was crazed with fear and it was all I could do to quiet her. Finally, however, I gave her my detachable tie to play with and her nerves quieted down. As a consequence of their tirade, Mother and Daddy have been very sweet on each other for the last few days and he has not been to the cousins since.”
Eventually, things between my great-grandparents got so bad that my great-grandfather moved out and went to Kentucky. While he was there, he was involved in a head-on car collision and was badly hurt. My great-grandmother went up to see him but when she got to the hospital, she saw that a woman he was having an affair with was there, so she wouldn’t go in. He died a day or two later.
In the letter, he talks about a night out with his friends. It obviously says a lot about racial attitudes at the time, but it also shows his willingness to experience life beyond the confines of his family. “We collected eleven of us and all piled in our five passenger car and went down to the Auditorium to look at a N---- dance. The dancing was wild and wooly. My dreams of Jazz had come true. There was Jazz, shimmy and everything. Buxom negro lasses in extreme dresses with their whole backs exposed besides a lot more were gliding around the floor as in a trance. Everybody was dressed fit to kill and were having the time of their young lives. It was two when I finally hit the hay.”
Scott was a good student. He enrolled at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville but after two or three days there, he left. He decided that he didn’t like the other students from Lynchburg who were there because they were only interested in drinking and playing cards. So, he took a train to Boston and enrolled at Harvard.
At Harvard, he met people from society. He met writers and artists. He acquired the affected Harvard accent of the day that had a touch of upper-crust English about it. He joined the famous Hasty Pudding social club and performed in full drag in several of their shows. He was introduced to a world that, afterward, he would try to hold onto for the rest of his life.
His college career done, he tried to make it as an actor in NY. He found that producers were only interested in strong manly men for the leading roles, and since he wasn’t content to be a supporting player, he gave up. After that, a wealthy friend’s father bankrolled him and the friend on a year-long trip through Europe. They had the time of their lives and struck up friendships there that would last decades. When he got back, Scott came home to visit the family in Rustburg. One morning he put on a pair of plus fours and a beret and walked down the main street to the little village store. Out in front was a group of local bearded men who sat around all day talking, spitting tobacco juice, and whittling. They had no idea what to make of this strange person standing in front of them. Scott stood his ground. He started telling them dirty jokes that made them laugh. He ended up spending the afternoon with them. For years after that, whenever my grandmother went to the store, they would ask after him.
Eventually, he got a job as an interior decorator in a department store in New York. After a while, he convinced some friends to back him and he opened his own firm, Scott Wilson Designs. At its peak, Scott had about a dozen employees. He designed tablecloths and napkins, wallpaper, and other household items. There was a well-known cabaret performer at the time named Dwight Fiske who recited risqué poems while accompanying himself on piano. He published many of them in a book that my great uncle illustrated. It was during this period of his life that he moved into 510 Park Avenue with the older Irving Cary who was a vice president of Corning Glass.
My father remembers being at a dinner party in that apartment once and being seated next to the Russian artist Boris Arzybasheff who, among many other things, painted over two hundred covers for Time magazine. Also at the party was Anna Case, an opera singer who’d not only performed at the Met but had made test recordings for Thomas Alva Edison in the early days of his phonograph invention. After the meal, Ms. Case was persuaded to sing for the guests. My father was impressed, but Mr. Arzybasheff thought that she was a bit beyond it.
During the war, the firm holding its own, Scott partnered with another designer named Fritz Foord. Foord was a painter and a designer who had worked in the production department at Paramount Pictures. Together they expanded the business. Three glass bowls that they designed together are currently in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Other pieces of theirs were featured in exhibitions at MOMA throughout the 50s.
Foord was occasionally part of the famous Algonquin roundtable. I found a Getty image online of him sitting with, among others, James Thurber and Dorothy Parker.
There is an iconic episode of the TV series I Love Lucy where Lucy gets it into her head to remodel their apartment, so she and Ethel try to tackle the wallpaper together on their own and lose. The wallpaper design featured in the show came from the Wilson/Foord collection.
Eventually, tastes changed, and their designs fell out of favor. The partnership dissolved and Scott and Fritz went their separate ways. Mr. Carey must have passed away by then because Scott was forced to live in smaller and smaller apartments. He tried starting a boutique in Lynchburg, but despite a big gala opening, nobody in Lynchburg was interested in the fancy things Scott was selling. It folded. Probably as a last-ditch effort to keep himself afloat, he married his office manager, Olvera Lang.
When my parents moved back to the United States just before I was born, Olvera met them at the dock and told them that Scott had taken his own life. It was a tragic and heartrending end for a man who had lived such an interesting life.
My father took my sister and me to New York once to have tea with Olvera in her apartment. I only have the most fleeting of memories of it. I was very young when we met her, and she was very old, but I wish things had been different and that I’d had the opportunity to talk with her about him. I don’t think she can have had any illusions about the man she’d married.
The night before last I went to watch an interview with the playwright Tom Stoppard at the 92nd Street Y. During it, he and the moderator talked about a scene in his remarkable new play, Leopoldstadt, about a photo album filled with people whose names, nobody could remember. All the people in the pictures died in the camps during the war along with anyone else who could have identified who they were. All those bright, happy, history-less faces staring out from the past without any context at all. It’s a truly sorrowful idea.
I have family albums full of pictures of people that I don’t have the slightest idea who they are. I also don’t have the slightest idea how to find that information. Some have been labeled by my grandmother and great-grandmother, but many are just anonymous people standing alongside the ones I can recognize. I am trying to save the ones I can, but so many of them I can feel just floating away. Even the ones I recognize I can only guess at what they were like. I have plenty of pictures of my great uncle Scott but not a single reliable witness to his life to fill in the gaps.
My father tells a story about a time when Scott came down to Lynchburg to visit. He had a circle of very wealthy friends down there, that nobody else in the family knew. One night, Floyd Knight who lived in the biggest mansion in town threw a formal dinner party to which Scott was invited. My dad drove him over to it, and on the way, they stopped at the drugstore to pick up some cigarettes. Scott was wearing tails, a top hat, and an opera cape so he sent Dad in to pick them up. He didn’t feel that he could go inside the shop dressed that way. He didn’t belong.
It sounds like a lonely life to me. I admire him for working so hard at living the life he wanted, but it seems to me to have come at an enormous cost. I think that if I could go back in time and speak to any person from the past, the person I choose might very well be my great uncle Scott. I think that he’d be happy that he had a gay great nephew. We could at least enjoy a fancy dinner out, although I wouldn’t have a thing to wear.
Phenomenal writing! Tears and smiles for your great uncle.
Thanks so much for writing about your Uncle Scott, Richard. I have been researching the once hugely popular and fascinating (but largely forgotten) phenomenon of all-male college musicals. Reliable information about the performers is often hard to come by. It was great to learn more about your Uncle Scott, who got great reviews for his skillful female impersonations in three Harvard shows.