daughter.
The chief drawback with men is that they are too talkative. I don’t mean intellectual men who are full of ideas and information about life. It’s always a delight to hear such men talk because they are not talking boastfully. The overtalkative men who bore me are the ones who talk about themselves. Sometimes they confine themselves to plain, uninterrupted boasting. They’ll sit for an hour telling you how smart they are and how stupid everybody else around them is. Sometimes they don’t even boast but give you an inside on what they like to eat and where they’ve been in the last five years.
Such men are a total loss. A man can please a woman by talking about himself after they’re lovers. Then he can confess all his sins and tell her of all the other women he has had.
Lovers who don’t do that and who keep silent on the subject of their pasts are very rare. And they are not too bright, either. Sometimes men like to hear about a woman’s past love affairs, but it’s better for a woman not to take a chance and tell. Unless she is truly in love and wishes to belong to the man entirely—and doesn’t mind a long spell of hollering.
Men who think that a woman’s past love affairs lessen her love for them are usually stupid and weak. A woman can bring a new love to each man she loves, providing there are not too many.
The most unsatisfactory men are those who pride themselves on their virility and regard sex as if it were some form of athletics at which you win cups. It is a woman’s spirit and mood a man has to stimulate in order to make sex interesting. The real lover is the man who can thrill you by just touching your head or smiling into your eyes—or by just staring into space.
23
I have always had a talent for irritating women since I was fourteen. Wives have a tendency to go off like burglar alarms when they see their husbands talking to me. Even young and pretty Hollywood “maidens” greet me with more sneer than smile.
This sort of sex fear that women often feel when I walk into their barnyard has different effects on me. I find it flattering—and upsetting. I find it also mysterious. Women don’t resent me because I’m prettier or better shaped than they are—or show more of myself to the male eye. I’ve seen women at parties who had only enough clothes on to keep from being arrested, and I’ve heard such party-nudists buzzing about how vulgar I was. They were showing more leg, more bosom, and more spinal column than I was—and I was the “vulgar” one!
Women also don’t like the way I talk—even when I’m not talking to their husbands or lovers. One angry woman said my voice was “too premeditated.” I found out she meant I was putting on a sort of bedroom drawl. This isn’t true. The chief difference between my voice and the voices of most women I’ve seen is that I use mine less. I can’t chatter if I wanted to. I can’t pretend to laugh and be full of some sort of foolish good spirits when I’m in company. Standing around at a party looking serious attracts unfavorable feminine comment. They think I’m plotting something, and usually the same thing—how to steal their gentlemen friends from under their noses.
I don’t mind their thinking that. I would rather a thousand women were jealous of me than I was jealous of one of them. I’ve been jealous, and its no fun.
Sometimes I’ve been to a party where no one spoke to me a whole evening. The men, frightened by their wives or sweeties, would give me a wide berth. And the ladies would gang up in a corner to discuss my dangerous character.
Being given the social cold shoulder like that never made me too unhappy. I’ve done most of my thinking at such parties, standing in a corner with a cocktail glass in hand and nobody to talk to. I’ve thought about women. Their jealousy had little to do with me. It comes out of their realizing their own shortcomings. Men have told me a lot about women—how lame their love-making often is, how they mistake hysteria for passion and nagging for devotion. Looking at me, women think I’m different than they are in such matters, and this makes them angry.
When I see women frowning in my direction and cutting me up among themselves, I really feel sorry—not for them but for their menfolk. I have a feeling that such women are poor lovers and sexual cripples. The only thing they are able to give a man is a guilt complex. If they are able to make him feel that he is a bad husband or an unappreciative lover, then they consider themselves “successful.”
24
Johnny Hyde’s kindness changed the outside world for me, but it didn’t touch my inner world. I tried hard to love him. He was not only kind, but loyal and wise and devoted.
He took me everywhere. People admired him and accepted me as his fiancee. But I wasn’t that. Johnny asked me to marry him. It wouldn’t be a long marriage, he said, because he had a heart condition. I never could say yes.
“Tell me again why you won’t marry me,” he would smile at me.
“Because it wouldn’t be fair,” I’d answer him. “I don’t love you, Johnny. That means if I married you I might meet some other man and fall in love with him. I don’t want that ever to happen. If I marry a man I want to feel I’ll always be faithful to him—and never love anyone else.”
Johnny was hurt by what I said, but his love wasn’t because he knew I was honest. He knew he could trust me. He was never jealous because of anything I had done. It was always because of what I might do. Most men have been jealous for the same reason. I’ve liked their jealousy. Often it was the only sincere thing about their love. Most men judge your importance in their lives by how much you can hurt them, not by how happy you can make them. But there was one kind of jealousy I never liked. It was the jealousy that kept a man asking questions about other men, and never letting up, and wanting to know more and more details. I felt then that my jealous friend was more interested in those men than in me, and that he was hiding a homosexuality in his pretended jealousy pains.
I did all I could to lessen Johnny Hyde’s fears. I never went out with other men. I was as faithful to him as he was kind to me.
Johnny Hyde gave me more than his kindness and love. He was the first man I had ever known who understood me. Most men (and women) thought I was scheming and two-faced. No matter how truthfully I spoke to them or how honestly I behaved, they always believed I was trying to fool them.
When I talk I have a habit of not finishing sentences, and this gives the impression I’m telling lies. I’m not. I’m just not finishing sentences. Johnny knew that I didn’t tell lies and that I wasn’t planning to fool him.
The truth is I’ve never fooled anyone. I’ve let men sometimes fool themselves. Men sometimes didn’t bother to find out who and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn’t argue with them. They were obviously loving somebody I wasn’t. When they found this out, they would blame me for disillusioning them— and fooling them.
I have even tried to be straightforward with women. This is more difficult than being straightforward with men. Men are often pleased when you tell them the truth about how you feel. But very few women want to hear any truth—if it’s going to be in any way annoying. As far as I can make out, women’s friendships with each other are based on a gush of lies and pretty speeches that mean nothing. You’d think they were all wolves trying to seduce each other the way they flatter and flirt when they’re together.
I found a few exceptions. There was one woman who helped me a great deal in my early Hollywood days— when I used to dream of getting enough money to own more than one brassiere. She gave me money and let me live in her home and wear her gowns and furs. She did this because she sincerely liked me and because she believed I had talent and would become a star some day. I’ll call her Della and so be able to write about her without embarrassing her.
