(Above: Ruth Ford photographed by Man Ray. 1945. The Smithsonian Institute. Gift of Juliet Man Ray. Twenty-seven years later she played the role of Carlotta, the mother of Tony Perkins’s character B.Z. Mendenhall, in director Frank Perry’s film Play It As It Lays with a screenplay by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne based on Didion’s novel.)
(Above: Charles Henri Ford photographed by Cecil Beaton. 1930s.)
I was just in Mississippi with my own siblings, a younger brother and sister, where we all grew up. It is always surreal to head back home for anyone who has moved away early on as I did when I was 19 in 1975 because the irrational juxtaposition of our childlike selves slumbering in our subconscious awaken to realize we are no longer children even as we churlishly feel leashed to who we once were. We revert, especially those of us who refused to remain. We ramble around in remembering. We lose our way once more in the overly familiar just as we once searched for our way out of it. We can still find everything there we ever really needed except for our truest selves. There is such a sense of place - southern writers are famous for it in their work, especially those most-mentioned Mississippians, Welty and Faulkner - and yet a sense of misplacement early on replaced it in our lives. It has taken a lifetime to reconfigure - no, wrong: accept - the aspects of our selves that made us feel unworthy and less-than and realize they are the aspects that make us instead if not celebrated in the wider world then at least better understood. Home: the hearth that clings to that second “h” so it won’t have to face the heart of its absence, one harder to reconcile than our own absence when we - relief all around - left that hearth behind. Family: the fumbling about in an equipoise that has always dizzied us with its deceptive performative welcome, an equipoise that we never felt equipped to understand with the grace that others do. We long for their grace. We grapple with our lack of it. We wean ourselves anew.
My brother lives in Brookhaven where a century ago two Mississippi siblings who lived there as well, Ruth Ford and her brother Charles Henri, weaned themselves from their own misplacement in such a place and set out into the wider world. The world that welcomed them was inhabited - yes, performatively - by Paul Bowles and Cecil Beaton and Man Ray and Salvador Dalí and Orson Welles and Carl Van Vechten and Gertrude Stein and George Platt Lynes and Marcel Duchamp and Djuna Barnes and Edith Sitwell and others of their illimitable ilk - and later on Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith and Andy Warhol, et al. - who took them into their concentric and intersecting circles where the two of them felt less dizzied themselves with the cultural vertigo that can be caused by a Mississippi childhood when one longs to understand that for which one longs, an inchoate kindling that fires the search for one’s own kind - and even a kindness that is deeper than the politesse that poses as such a thing in such an outpost of columned porches and weaponized pulpits and the calumny of ladies with lovely manners.
The Ford siblings lived next to each other at the Dakota in New York for their final few decades (both were in their 90’s when they died) and have now circled back to Brookhaven - “Alas,” I can hear Ruth’s voice with that rueful catch in her throat she could never quite cough up - where their ashes are interred in the local Rose Hill Cemetery next to their parents and grandparents. I went looking for their graves twice while I was back home in Brookhaven but couldn’t find them, hapless in the mapless maze of graves even though I knew the section and lot in which they were interred. It was frustrating and deepened the sadness that always finally re-seeps into my Mississippi sissified soul when I am there. I am now in Asheville, North Carolina, for a week after a short southern road trip that took me to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where I saw the Crimson Tide’s opening football game, and Highlands, North Carolina, where I encountered its manicured nouveau riche allure, but I am still trying to understand the feeling that overtook me in the heat of those two afternoons at Rose Hill Cemetery back in Brookhaven, Mississippi, as I walked among the headstones hankering for some curiously inchoate thing again as I had in my own childhood, a connection, a kindredness that finally is not familial but tribal. Tried as I might, I just couldn’t locate their headstones although from my research I knew that Ruth’s was inscribed: Beloved wife of Zachary Scott/Actress - Muse. Charles Henri’s: Sleeping Through His Reward. As I searched and searched I did wonder why it had become so important to me to find their graves and why their headstones had instead become rosetta stones for me. I will now remember my rambling around after researching their graves as a kind of re-searching for myself. Was my failure at finding them when I was back in Mississippi a manifestation of my failure of ever having found myself there and a fear that my own last alas will be an interment in the place that soiled me with its incomprehension, a feeling with which I was imbued that seeded its contempt for difference in the flouting of the flowery eccentricities that it allows to flourish there within the shade of live oaks and deadening shame? I have written about the spiritual and cultural pilgrimage I am now on in my life. The broken shoulder I suffered in Paris did not stymy it but instead became a crucible of brokenness that helped me better understand myself as a toughened old coot who has had to experience my present state of healing bound by my hide even as I refuse to be hidebound in doing so. But I did feel stymied as I searched for Ruth and Charles Henri - and thus myself - in that Mississippi cemetery. I found none of us there but is not finding ourselves in Mississippi no matter how diligently I searched in the dare of its unrelenting heat a deeper surreal signal to me from them - not finding the thus of us is the discovery of the this of me: my reward is to continue to wake, there is no shade, I am no one’s muse but my mined own.
(Above: One of the two afternoons I went searching unsuccessfully for the graves of Ruth Ford and her brother Charles Henri Ford in Brookhaven’s Rose Hill Cemetery when I was back home for a horridly hot month in Mississippi.)
“Charles Henri Ford, a poet, editor, novelist, artist and legendary cultural catalyst whose career spanned much of 20th-century modernism, died on Friday in Manhattan,” wrote Roberta Smith in his The New York Times obituary which ran in the paper’s September 20, 2002, edition. “He was 94 and lived in Manhattan and had a house in Katmandu. Mr. Ford, who also had homes in Paris and on Crete for many years, was peripatetic, precocious, charismatic, multitalented and very productive. He said he was inspired by the multimedia career of Jean Cocteau and by Cocteau's description of himself as a poet in everything he does.
“Mr. Ford was considered America's first Surrealist poet and, by some, a precursor of the New York School. His first poem appeared in The New Yorker while he was still a teenager; he eventually published 16 books of poetry. But he was also a co-writer, with his lifelong friend the writer and film critic Parker Tyler, of The Young and Evil (Paris, 1933), which many consider to be the first gay novel. The book, based on the author's adventures in Greenwich Village bohemia, was banned in the United States until the 1960's …
“The simplest summation of Mr. Ford's life and work may be that he did exactly what he wanted, and seemingly knew everyone.”
Here is an excerpt as well from Ruth’s obit which was written by Dennis Hevesi and appeared in the The New York Times’s August 14, 2009, edition: “Ruth Ford, a film and stage actress who turned her Manhattan apartment in the Dakota into a salon as she became something of a muse to writers, artists and musicians, died at her home on Wednesday. She was 98.
“Her lawyer, Karin Gustafson, confirmed her death and her age; Ms. Ford had long insisted she was four years younger.
“For more than 40 years, Ms. Ford’s apartment in the Dakota, the gabled, fortresslike building on the northwest corner of 72nd Street that was built in the 1880s, welcomed the likes of William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Terrence McNally and Truman Capote.
“‘If Ms. Ford had lived in another century, she would have been one of the great salonnieres of all time,’ the lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim told People magazine in 1975.
“It was a chance encounter between Sondheim and librettist Arthur Laurents in her Manhattan living room that led to their collaboration, with Leonard Bernstein, on West Side Story, the magazine said.
“Dark-haired and delicate, Ms. Ford had arrived in New York from her native Mississippi in the mid-1930s and was soon modeling for famous photographers, including Carl Van Vechten, Man Ray and Cecil Beaton. Her image appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle and Vogue. The surrealist Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew did a portrait of her.
“Ms. Ford’s entry into New York’s cultural scene was eased by her brother, Charles Henri Ford, a poet, novelist and artist who was already well known among the bohemian crowd and who was long the lover of Tchelitchew.
“Born in Brookhaven, Miss., on July 7, 1911, Ms. Ford was the daughter of Charles and Gertrude Cato Ford. Her parents owned hotels in four Southern towns, and she and her brother spent much of their childhoods moving from one town to another. After her brother moved to New York, she visited him and became entranced.
“‘My brother had all these strange, wonderful people around him,’ she told After Dark magazine in 1974. ‘And once I had seen them, once I had seen New York, well, what the hell was I going to do in Mississippi? Marry a shoe salesman?’”
(Above: The 1927 issue of The New Yorker in which the 19-year-old Charles Henri Ford published the poem below. I just went through the whole issue and read the theatre listings that included Africana, “a snappy brown revue” starring Ethel Waters, a film review of the just released Wings, which would go on to win the first Oscar for Best Picture, a profile of boxer Gene Tunny titled “Gene the Genteel” written by Kelly Coombs, Janet Flanner’s “Paris Letter” which was bylined with her pseudonym Genêt and in which she mentioned that Alfred Knopf was in the city to sign up new books including André Gide’s Les Faux Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters), the only work of fiction he bought on the trip. What Flanner, a lesbian, failed to write is that the book contains an honest treatment of homosexuality within its narrative. Or perhaps she did and Harold Ross, the founder and editor of The New Yorker who was a bluenose about sex as a subject in his magazine, edited it out. What he shockingly did not edit out was the N-word in the title of a piece of reportage by Morris Markey titled “The N….. and the Kingsway,” which was about a schooner hauling lumber to the Gold Coast and the Black cook onboard who murdered his wife. )
Ruth Ford was more attracted to actors than salesmen of any sort - although, I guess, actors are in some way salesmen themselves of other people’s wares. She first married Peter van Eyke, a German American actor, and was photographed with him by Carl Van Vechten. After their divorce in the 1940s, she married actor Zachary Scott in 1952 and Van Vechten photographed them as well. Scott died in 1965. Ford never remarried but she did have a long relationship with the much younger writer and journalist Dotson Rader. Slim Aarons photographed them. Rader and I were colleagues for a time at Parade magazine where we alternated writing cover stories for its then tens of millions of readers each Sunday. When Ruth died at the age of 98, I emailed Dotson to offer my condolences although they had long ago ceased to be a couple. He wrote back that her death at least proved this adage: the good die young. His curtness did make me grin - rather grimly, but a grin nonetheless.
Early in her acting career, Ruth Ford was a member of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre and appeared in his 1938 silent film Too Much Johnson along with Joseph Cotton and Arlene Francis. The music composed to accompany the film was by Paul Bowles. On Broadway, she appeared in Sartre’s existential No Exit in 1946, a Strindberg double-bill of Miss Julie and The Stronger in 1956, her own adaptation of William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun (she shared the playwright’s credit with him) which co-starred Zachary Scott in 1959 and in which she portrayed the lead character Temple Drake, a revival of Kaufman and Ferber’s Dinner at Eight in 1966 in which she again co-starred with Arlene Francis among many others, the musical adaptation of Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp in 1971, Poor Murderer by Czech playwright Pavel Kohout in 1976, and the stage adaptation of Harold and Maude in which she played Harold’s mother in 1980 with Keith McDermott as Harold and Janet Gaynor as Maude. Ford also appeared off-Broadway in Mart Crowley’s A Breeze from the Gulf in 1973, which I saw on my first visit to New York when I was 17. Critic Clive Barnes in The New York Times wrote of her performance, “Ruth Ford, tearing at tantrums, shivering at shadows, gives a terrifying glimpse at the half‐world of genteel drug addiction O'Neill so memorably depicted in A Long Day's Journey Into Night. I shall always remember Miss Ford in Requiem for a Nun and this requiem for a mother is in its way as impressive.” She would have made a great Mary Tyrone.
Ford first met Faulkner in the 1930s in Oxford, Mississippi, where, it has been reported, she dated both his younger brother and his nephew. Some say she also had an affair with Faulkner himself. They two were certainly close. She even saved his life when he came to New York in 1948 - he hadn’t been to the city in a decade - to publicize and celebrate Random House’s publication of Intruder in the Dust. Bennett Cerf, Random House’s co-founder, even asked the author to stay with him at his home - perhaps sensing that he could keep a closer eye on him and his drinking. Faulkner instead asked him in a letter to book him a room at the Algonquin Hotel and Cerf acquiesced. In that same letter, Faulkner wrote that he planned to meet up with “a Mississippi friend, an actress, Ruth Ford.” But when Ford contacted him at the Algonquin he begged off meeting with her. She thought his voice sounded a bit strange and assumed he might be drinking alone in his room. She called the next day and his voice was stranger still, the slur of slowness the drawl not drawn from one’s southern heritage but from hiding with more than one bottle behind drawn curtains. By the third day, there was no response at all when she had the hotel’s operator ring his room. Worried now, she contacted their mutual friend, poet and playwright and novelist Harvey Breit who was also the Assistant Editor for The New York Times Book Review where he wrote a column in which he interviewed other writers. Together they headed to the Algonquin and found Faulkner semi-conscious from the binge he’d been on. They called an ambulance but, having roused Faulkner enough for him to convince them that a hospital stay for the reasons of his being found semi-conscious in an hotel room caused by his drinking would be bad publicity for his new novel, Ford quickly came up with an alternate plan. She called another mutual friend, writer and editor Malcolm Cowley at his home in Sherman, Connecticut, and asked if he and his wife, Muriel, would take in Faulkner for the weekend and help him to dry out. Cowley, who had the year before edited The Portable Faulkner and written its introductory essay which had revived the author’s literary reputation - Robert Penn Warren called it “the great watershed moment” of Faulkner’s career - and which even led, it could be argued, to Faulkner’s winning the Nobel Prize for Literature the very next year, agreed to the plan. The following week Cowley sent Faulkner back to New York City after the writer had asked Cowley if he could take his copy of Charles Jackson’s novel about alcoholism, The Lost Weekend, with him to read. He let him. “"I owe Malcolm Cowley the kind of debt no man could ever repay,” Faulkner later said.
(Above and below: Charles Henri Ford photographed by Cecil Beaton in a costume designed by Salvador Dalí. 1937.)
(Above: Ruth Ford photographed for Vogue by Cecil Beaton in a gown designed by Schiaparelli. 1936.)
I met Ruth in 1976 when I was still an actor myself and we appeared together in an abridged version of that musical adaptation of The Grass Harp in which she starred as Verena Talbo for its brief Broadway run. It was for Camera Three, the cultural Sunday morning program that was broadcast on CBS from 1956 to 1979. I played the role of Colin Talbo, her character’s nephew. I even had the first solo. (You can see the whole broadcast on Youtube here.) Ruth had returned to the role as a favor to her dear friend, Claibe Richardson, its composer. Poet Kenward Elmslie, a friend of both Ruth and Charles Henri, wrote the book and lyrics and served as the Narrator for the abridged version he devised for Camera Three.
During a break in rehearsals at CBS Broadcast Center on West 57th Street, Ruth and I were talking about the mutuality of our childhoods in Mississippi. I wasn’t too far away from my own since I had only recently turned 20. We were bonding a bit having each dared to choose another kind of adulthood that had brought us into the presence of the other. I had even gotten her to laugh at my expense sensing it would be more difficult to make her do so at her own. But I chanced a question anyway. “So did you fuck Faulkner?” I asked.
“Alas,” she said.
“Is that a yes or a no?”
“The two most boring answers in the human language,” was all she offered. My curtness did make her grin - rather grimly, but a grin nonetheless. But then all grinning - all laughter- was rent from the look she decided to wring from the stare she gave me. My impertinence had forever paused our possible friendship. “Now, young man, let’s run our lines,” she said with a haunted haughtiness that more than hinted that she was long over having to save another lost southerner from himself. It was the last thing she ever said to me that wasn’t in a script.
TO BE TO CONTINUED IN PART TWO WHEN I WRITE MORE ABOUT CHARLES HENRI ….