guess.”) She told us the perfectly hysterical story of how Donald Wollheim finally told Michel that he could no longer see Judy because she had been a Trotskyite (Wollheim was a Stalinist; none of them were over twenty-one) and tried to expel her from the group; and how she and Virginia Kidd had gotten the rest of them together and expelled them from the Futureans in return.
“Where was Sam Moskowitz in all this?” I asked.
Judy laughed. “Off in New Jersey, I suppose, writing The Immortal Storm.”
She told us about her first meeting with Ted Sturgeon, who was rooming down the street from her with Jay Stanton at the time in the late ’40s when her Fuller Brush Man informed her that there was an SF writer living in the neighborhood—and Judy, already a Sturgeon fan, sent Ted a fan letter and was invited to come over.
She also spoke of her equally legendary affair with Walter O. (“Darfsteller,” Canticle for Leibowitz) Miller, from half a dozen years later. And how, with their combined five children, they fled about the country, now to Texas, now to Chicago, now to Florida, to escape hounding X-es. (“For better or for worse, it really was the passion of my life. I remember once, in some hotel, we were in bed together. And in the dark, after we’d just finished making love, Walt said to me: ‘We’re both wonderful performers. And we’ve both found the perfect audience. I wonder if we’ll ever perform for anyone else?’ But really, that was the level the whole thing happened on—” she chuckled, sitting back on the green couch Big Del Gaizo Fellow had given me the month before, raising the general designer standard of the living room by a good three-hundred percent—“or almost all of it, anyway.”) In the course of the story, she recounted a harrowing scene, when, in some shack in Florida, long, lanky Fred Pohl showed up to physically wrest back his and Judy’s mutual daughter, Ann, at which point Walt came in with a gun. (“Fred, with impressive bravery—he really didn’t know it wasn’t loaded—grabbed the thing by the barrel and yanked it out of Walt’s hands!”) The two men ended up rolling all over the kitchen floor (“… while I stood there like a ninny, crying, ‘You can’t do that in here! If you’re going to do that, take it outside! Go on, don’t fight in here! Fight outside’”). Fred’s glasses got broken. (“That was really the end of it, because without them he was perfectly blind—only Walt didn’t know that!”) Three-year-old Merril came running up to her 26-year-old ex-stepfather with all the fragments—Fred was still searching around for them on the floor—and said: ‘Here they are, daddy!’”
The story went on, tense with out-of-state phone calls and advice from Milt Amgott (up until half a dozen years ago my own aging lawyer, but back in the late-’40s the entire science fiction community’s legal eagle), and climaxed in the custody trial at which Judy lost Ann to Fred and at which, quite to Judy’s astonishment, Walt’s refined, southern Gentle Woman mother testified on Judy’s behalf. (“Ah can think of no home in which Ah would prefer to see my grandchildren raised.”) I was impressed, Judy told me. The judge was impressed. But then, Mrs. Miller was a very impressive woman!
Still, the verdict went against Judy—since it was nineteen fifty and she and Walt were unquestionably “living in sin”; also Fred had now married Carol, and thus had an unstained home for the kids to come to.
That custody trial polarized the whole SF community. It is actually the explanation—I’ve known this for years—for the perfectly mindless selection of SF writers cited in Kingsley Amis’s New Maps of Hell. (Only the Pohl-side writers are represented in the book.) And although Fred and Judy have more or less healed their breach and appear on panels with each other and are probably, today, a bit more friendly than M. and I (I have even seen them dance together at an SF convention party!), you can still see the traces of the alignments in the attitudes of the older writers, even today.
The day Judy left for the Caribbean, Barbara Wise’s 25-year-old daughter, Julie, got married in a truly sumptuous home wedding. For the affair, I actually bought my first pair of dress shoes in about ten years. Then, a trip to the thrift store on 98th Street netted me a Pierre Cardin suit that almost fits, for a mere thirty dollars. It’s really quite handsome. Iva picked up her best party clothes from her mother’s, then she and I went down to attend on Sunday evening. I wept through the whole service, while Iva giggled at me.
The one real sadness there was that Barbara’s close friend Michael had been supposed to help out tending bar. I think I mentioned to you that he had AIDS, when we all had Christmas dinner together at Barbara’s in ’87. Well, the day of the wedding, he had to go into the hospital; he’s been falling a lot, sleeping even more; and a cat scan shows it’s gone to the brain—which is how it took Ralph, the year before. This may well be it. But the ceremony was lovely.
The bride looked beautiful. A harpist and flautist played throughout. All of Howard’s electronic art was a-glitter, a-flash, and a-blink about their sepulchrally large living room—including the great, John Ray wall light-sculpture (which had been on the fritz for the last half dozen years, but which Barbara had gotten Ray in to fix for the occasion—he lives here in Amherst, too! Barbara and I spent a lovely evening with him in December). The food Barbara managed to get together (down in the well that drops through the midst of the living room floor stood an immense ice sculpture of a dragon, set about with spring tropic flowers—because the newlyweds were to be honeymooning in the tropics) was beyond belief:
Shrimp. Ham. Vegetarian crepes. New potatoes stuffed with caviar (Sevruga!), salads and wonderfully fresh vegetables, and three kinds of champagne for the various courses—Deutch with the canapés, Taittinger with the entree—and (a daring move that worked, just taking people’s heads off!) peach champagne with the sumptuous wedding cake.
I had a long talk with one of the groom’s 17-year-old sons, and decided that—though going through a rough adolescence—he is a profoundly good kid.
There were about a hundred guests.
This Christmas my sister had given us tickets to Andrew Lloyd (Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cats, Starlight Express) Webber’s and Charles Hart’s The Phantom of the Opera.
The Monday after the wedding, on January 23rd, wearing much what we’d worn the night before, Iva and I went to see it.
It’s customary to say that the show is dreadful—but it’s just musically rather complicated. The production is lavish (and the season’s hugest Broadway success) on an order that the Broadway term “lavish” doesn’t usually cover. As spectacle, it makes it almost impossible to pay attention to the music—which is a decent modern-middlebrow leitmotif opera. But the spectacle is, I’m sure, why it’s successful.
The opening twin scenes are breathtaking. You enter a theater in ruins, with scenery fallen over the stage and gray hangings covering the proscenium, dust cloths on all the scenic statuary, some of which shows, broken and tarnished, from beneath it.
The lights go down, and, on stage, an auction starts. Objects from the old theater are being sold off. An old man in a wheelchair buys a little music box, on which a figure of a monkey plays cymbals. Lying askew on the stage, a huge, old theatrical chandelier is uncovered. The auctioneer explains that this is, indeed, the chandelier that figured in the disaster involved with “the strange affair of the Phantom of the Opera, never fully explained.” An attempt to illuminate the old object produces a sudden shower of sparks and short circuits, but suddenly the cables begin to haul the clinking, glittering object up from the boards, out over the audience, and toward the actual theater ceiling—at which point the entire house (not just the stage), over some twenty-eight bars of thunderous triple-fff organ, mostly in darkness, but with shafts of light darting now here, now there, to spotlight some instant of the transformation, returns to its 1890’s gilt and gaslit splendor!
It
