virgil thomson


In the early 60s I was sharing a factory loft on Cooper Square in lower Manhattan with the painter-sculptor Edward Meneeley. We rarely watched television but one evening PBS was showing a film which he said I should see. It was Pare Lorentz's Louisiana Story. It is a beautiful film, but I was especially touched by the music. As the credits told me, the music was composed by someone named Virgil Thomson. The name meant nothing to me, but after some conversation and mails, I quickly learned more about the gentleman.

And gentleman he was. I have never known anyone who more deserved the label.

Alfred Frankenstein, music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, and I had been writing to each other about art-related matters, and when I mentioned Thomson to him it was as if two friends had met in a desert. Alfred had the then-unavailable Victor recording of excerpts from the opera Four Saints in Three Acts which Virgil had done with Gertrude Stein, and he kindly sent me a tape of it. I was also able to get a recording of Virgil's music for Lorentz's film, The Plow That Broke the Plains.

Then someone (I don't recall who) told me that Virgil was living at the Chelsea Hotel. So I wrote to him, just to tell him how much I loved his music. He replied, on that elegant small writing paper he used, and invited me to join one of his Sunday salons. Having been so enchanted by tales of Parisian life in the twenties, the mere idea that someone could still be having such gatherings was intoxicating. To be invited to one, and by such an imminent person was heady stuff for a 22-year-old.

Those gatherings were to be a treasured part of my life for many years. There is a montage of memories from them ... Virgil at the grand piano while Betty Allen sang his songs; sitting at the feet of Edward Albee and gazing at him in shameless adoration while his lover glared at me; Leonard Bernstein putting his hand on my leg and getting a witty verbal slap from Virgil; sipping absinthe from a forbidden jug; being handed as a gift a first edition of Gertrude's Three Lives; a never-ending, totally fascinating parade of artists, writers and musicians from everywhere on the planet. Often the conversation was in French, and I was lost. Even more often the guests were people I had never heard of and only later realized how silly I was not to have done my research better.

But ... in my twenties I was the kind of clean-cut, handsome young American fellow who was much admired by gentlemen of a certain age, and thus could surf waters which by rights should have drowned me. I am sure many guests just assumed I had been invited as decoration and perhaps in the beginning, that was just it. Virgil wanted his guests to be amused.

Our friendship grew, though, and lasted for the rest of his life. When I moved to London, we continued our correspondence. In the year of the release of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Virgil came to London. I was living in a flat in the West Cromwell Road which was done up in the best psychedelic hippy style of the time, including a bedroom which was lined, floor-to-14-foot-ceiling in bookshelves, all painted a deep red and entered through a rectangular hole in the wall of the hallway. I warned Virgil that he had to step up to get through the hole, but he missed the step. Then he asked to hear the Beatle's masterwork. Fortunately I had a first-class sound system, but he also wanted to follow the lyrics while listening. The only light in the red room was provided by deep orange lightbulbs. Anyone who remembers the original cover of that album will know how impossible it was to read the lyrics in such a setting. But arrangements were quickly made to provide Virgil with white light, and he listened to the entire album while following the lyrics and considered it "worth listening to". From someone who had struck terror in the heart of musicians during his time as a critic, it was indeed a laurel for the Beatles.

Then, and on many other occasions, it was my pleasure to cook for Virgil. My favorite dinner party was for him and Tennessee Williams, when I had to scurry all over London to find the right materials for a real Southern dinner, but that was perhaps matched by a dinner I cooked for him years later on the upper West Side of Manhattan which was composed entirely of dishes from the Cookbook of Alice B. Toklas. I cannot recall who the other guests were, or even what recipes were used, but I do remember his kindly seal of approval for the effort.

I organized an appreciation society called Bee Vine Time and Virgil gave me tapes to make available to the members of the society. We had a small but respected membership, but alas, Lady Bird Johnson refused to be a honorary chairperson and we could not get tax-exempt status, so the effort never went beyond the publication of a few brochures and making for a brief time some recordings that had never been, and still not are, available.

In the seventies, I moved into the Chelsea Hotel myself for some months. Next to my suite was Viva, one of Andy Warhol's superstars. We both loved Virgil and he was very kind to us at a time when we were almost destitute and often dependent upon some kind person who left meals in the stairwell outside our rooms. It was bizarre to go from eating corn flakes with water to sitting at Virgil's huge dinner table laden with hummingbird-on-toast and, happily, more substantial offerings. I recall especially one such dinner when the guest of honor was my visiting friend, the British composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. I had been in such dire straits in the week preceding Max's visit and had been in such a state of excitement about Virgil's plans to entertain Max that I had to flee the dinner party for a time, return to my own suite and vomit before returning to the table. True Roman style.

Strangely, I cannot remember for sure the last time I saw Virgil, but certainly one of the last times was at a dinner party I arranged in the late 70s at the Nirvana Restaurant overlooking Central Park West. I went down to the Chelsea to accompany Virgil to the party and in the taxi on the way to the restaurant mentioned that they did not have a liquor license. "Then we must buy some drink," he said, and we stopped at a shop and acquired a considerable supply of premium beers.

Once, during the poorest time of my life at the Chelsea, I had gone to Virgil to pick up some leftover food he said he couldn't use. As I was leaving, he asked "don't you need any sugar?" The look on his face, like the famous poem about Santa, soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread, but I knew it wasn't the way it should be, so I gave him a hug and said "no, no sugar".

But knowing him was indeed one of the sweetest blessings of this long life.

return to main index